The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
Part 1: Sheffield Steel
What was all that stuff?
What did it do? What was it made of? How was it made?
And why did it need to be made that way?
A very personal-and-technical, written-and-photographic, history by James MacLaren.
Page 1: Introduction - General Overview.
We're going to be learning about a Space Shuttle Launch Pad.
In extraordinarily-great detail.
Go ahead. Click the image for full-size. It's swarming with inscrutable labels that cannot possibly make proper sense to you right now, and when you click it for full-size to get it to render at 6,450 pixes wide by 10,935 pixels high, you will be able to clearly see all of those incomprehensible labels, and by the time we're done with these photo-essays, you will understand all of it.
Here it is again, looking back down at it from the end of the Hammerhead Crane. Click it.
And we're going to be learning about it using these, and many more, scanned copies of the original photographic prints I myself took during its construction.
For those with the fortitude to plow through the tremendous amount of information to follow, detailed understanding of the entire launch pad will come. You will be plowing through information at a level of detail which towers above the surrounding informational landscape, including NASA's own documentation, much as the towers of Launch Complex 39-B loomed above the surrounding wilderness of the Merritt Island Launch Area.
Technical detail. Using the original engineering contract drawings, none of which have ever been seen in public before. Using NASA's own technical documentation of things, the originals, wherever we can find them and make use of them.
Personal-experience detail. Of wide-eyed wonder, amazement, and strict-definition awe, seen by someone tapped for unknown reasons by The Hand of Fate, who first arrived at the Pad with zero background in this field. Zero. NONE. Beginner's Eyes in the truest sense of those words, traversing at first, just the Pad Deck, but shortly after that, walking high steel with the Union Ironworkers who built the towers.
Cultural detail. Grizzled ironworkers, tough as nails, calmly going about their daily work of hanging iron in astoundingly life-threatening situations and locations. NASA engineers, grappling with the business of solving problems that no one had ever had to solve before. Contract managers, battling to stay afloat financially and bring the project in on-time and on-budget.
And rest assured that the cultural detail you're going to get will include the linguistic detail, and in this narrative you're going to be spoken to in the lingua franca of the construction worker which I became, and which was all I ever heard, up on high steel and down on the ground in the offices, all around me, every day, from all of the men and all of the women I found myself working with, and construction worker language has an attitude, and is COARSE, and if you have trouble with words like "fuck" or "motherfucker" or "goddamn" or any of the rest of it...
Well then...
You're going to have trouble.
Construction worker slang, lingo, dialect, you name it, all comes exceptionally well-salted with attitude and a vast array of curse words, and for whatever reasons, in the larger literary world, construction worker dialects get very short shrift, and zero respect, and I am hereby taking it upon myself to do what I can to rectify that sort of discrimination against what amounts to an entire language by using it at every opportunity.
So. Bluenoses, prigs, prisses, killjoys, old maids, cultural-imperialists, and goody-two-shoes of all stripe and color...
Be warned.
'Cause it's coming, and it going to be given the full respect which it is due, despite your own unending efforts to exterminate it and replace it with your own gutless, spineless, euphemism-laced bullshit, even as you hold your hands tightly over your own ears and the ears of your children, screaming "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"
So ok. So go back and click again on both of those photographs up above these words. Be sure and bring the images up to full size and read the blizzard of incomprehensible labeling on them, and then know, that if you stay with it, if you read all of what follows, you will understand every bit of it, with the working familiarity and knowledge of one of us.
One of those who worked there.
We're going to build this thing.
I did five years in structural steel construction management on Space Shuttle (Previously Project Apollo) Launch Complex 39-B when it was being converted from a Saturn V & Saturn 1-B, Apollo launch pad into a Space Shuttle launch pad, from early 1980 through to the very end of 1985.
After Pad B, I also worked at Launch Complex 41, which we converted from a Titan III launch pad to a Titan IV launch pad, starting in 1985 and proceeding through 1990, working at pad 41 and occasionally elsewhere, and some of what was done at facilities other than Pad B is germane to gaining a more-complete understanding of the work done there, and that too will appear in what follows.
During my time at 39-B, I acquired a deep familiarity with the entire launch pad, splitting my time on the job between working with the plans and specifications in a worksite field trailer, and tracking overall job progress and dealing with day-to-day issues, out on the pad itself, and up in the air above the pad, walking high steel with the ironworkers who were doing the actual work, assembling the gigantic steel structures of the pad.
I resided in a strange netherworld, straddling the two wildly-different cultures of ironworkers and engineers, but I immediately gravitated toward, and related better on a day-to-day basis, with the ironworkers, and that initial gravitation remained with me for the duration. In my own personal estimation, for the most part, but with significant exceptions here and there in both directions of course, the ironworkers were better people. Make of that, what you will.
The ironworkers insulted me by calling me an engineer (and this was a real insult, and conveyed deep contempt whenever it was spit in my direction), and the engineers insulted me by calling me an ironworker (with equal contempt when spit in my direction from their side of things), but I was neither.
I wound up somehow getting along outstandingly with both groups, burrowing deeply into their respective realms, but was not a native in either one.
I was a traveler, miraculously given long-term entrance to impossibly distant and exotic kingdoms with tightly-closed borders, admitting few, guarding their treasures harshly and zealously.
But through it all, my heart always sided with the ironworkers, first.
The people who were putting it on the line, each and every day.
Since I was in construction management (and there's another insult for you, if you want one), had access to the entire jobsite, and I also had a camera permit, I took a lot of photos, many of which wound up in photo albums which have survived the passage of time to the present day.
Recently (in the year 2011), my son advised me that people might be interested in taking a look at things, as seen from the inside, as the structural elements of Launch Complex 39-B were erected and the launch pad took on its finished shape.
I have over 200 photos, including sequences of all the swing-arm lifts and a lot of general-vicinity shots of the pad and its environs from up on the pad deck, along with numerous shots taken from up in the structures of the RSS (Rotating Service Structure, which was also referred to as the Rotary Bridge during the earlier days of the project) and FSS (Fixed Service Structure, which was also referred to as the SSAT, Shuttle Service and Access Tower during the earlier days of the project), and a few other places too. I've done extensive research into this material and so far have found nothing else, anywhere, that covers the same ground. NASA themselves seem to have not documented the story of this construction work photographically or otherwise, nor did anyone else that I have any awareness of. If that turns out to be the case (and so far, and unless and until something changes, it certainly is the case), then that is both a sobering and a humbling thing to consider.
For those of you who seek a highly-detailed (but woefully limited, nonetheless) historical accounting of how something as monumental as the Space Shuttle Launch Pads (there were two of them) were built, who seek to learn about the events that went into the creation of Launch Complex 39-B for the Space Shuttle Program from someone who was there when it all happened, I'm all you're ever going to get.
I shall here and now express my undying and unlimited thanks to Manfred Rohr in Germany, who tipped me to the location of a set of structural steel demolition drawings which I could access for myself, and place them into what follows in the form of links to assist readers in a technical understanding of the layout, location, and physical particulars of the pad.
These are the contract drawings which were used to dismantle that which we had originally built at Launch Complex 39-B, and which was finished and handed over to NASA for Space Shuttle operations in late 1985. The demolition work was begun in late 2010, so what you will be learning about in the following pages no longer exists. The RSS no longer exists. The Space Shuttle Program no longer exists. The Space Shuttles themselves, remain as museum pieces, but the pair of great steel towers which were used to prepare them for launch at Pad B no longer exist. They lasted roughly thirty years, but are now utterly gone.
Looking at the photographs that follow, the photographs I took with my own camera, and knowing what, exactly, it is that you are looking at, greatly enhances the experience, and whenever I can add to understanding, I shall do so.
In addition, I shall further express my undying and unlimited thanks to additional, as-yet unnameable, benefactors who have recently provided me with complete sets of the original 79K-series of drawings and specifications for both launch pads, Space Shuttle Launch Complexes 39-A (which was built first) and 39-B (which was built second, and which was the one I worked on).
Drawing package 79K10338 contains 403 large-size sheets and comprises the FSS (which is called the SSAT in the drawing package, and which was already structurally complete by the time I arrived on the jobsite) at Launch Complex 39-B. The very first sheet of 79K10338, drawing number V-1, clearly states that the package contains only 395 sheets, but over time, modifications to the elements which make up the pad resulted in the addition (and deletion) of additional sheets, with the end result being that the drawing package which we will be referring to contains 403 sheets in total, and not the 395 sheets which is listed on drawing V-1.
Let this be your first introduction into the bewildering world of facilities modifications, which is a place where things are not always exactly what they are stated in plain words to be. A place where those who would visit it must do so warily, exercising great caution as they traverse the landscape within, lest they run afoul of things, some of which could be quite dangerous and expensive to encounter, unawares.
Much of what follows in the stories that go with each photograph I took, involving disputes, conundrums, and things that fail to make any sense at all on the surface, follows from this business of how things change as a Great Project unfolds, and how those changes are (and sometimes are not) documented.
79K14110 covers the RSS at Launch Complex 39-B which was what I was so deeply involved in the construction of. The SSAT and Rotary Bridge (RSS) at Launch Complex 39-A were both covered by a single document, 79K04400.
To help keep you from getting lost, I need to tell you that Gigantic Projects contain hundreds or even thousands of separate engineering drawings, and the great divisions in most projects cleave Drawing Packages into the following groups: Architectural, Civil, Electrical, Mechanical, Structural, and Vicinity. Not always, but most of the time, ok? Sometimes you won't get one or another, and every once in a while you'll get something else, but most of the time... and you need to know this because, in any given Package, drawing numbers will start with a letter which is followed by a number, and to use a random example, the seventeenth drawing in the structural Package will be numbered "S-17." All well and good, but when you're dealing with multiple Drawing Packages, that "S-17" can, and will, repeat, with the exact same number showing up in different packages, and... which one is it? And here is where you learn that the big Drawing Package Number is what distinguishes one "S-17" from another. So. Here and now. Kind of make a mental note of that, ok? It's the drawing package number that nails things down uniquely, in conjunction with any given drawing number.
79K14110 and 79K10338 are the actual drawing packages we built the pad to, and will be extensively referenced in what follows, to provide a precise technical background for what is being shown and described in the photographs I took, which form the basis for this personal history. I still cannot believe my good luck in acquiring these drawing packages, and when I first laid eyes on them, they appeared to me as long-lost relatives whom I feared I would never again cross paths with. It was a strongly emotional family reunion.
The included 79K drawing packages used for technical reference cover the work that was done prior to the design, construction, and erection of those large-scale modifications to the RSS and the FSS at Pad B which constitute (but are not limited to) the multifarious elements of the OWP (Orbiter Weather Protection) system, and instead cover the main work (with a few significant exceptions) which was done during my tenure on the job. These will be the primary (but not the only) drawings from which I will excerpt material to assist in the technical recounting of this personal history. Some of the Pad A drawings found in 79K04400 better illustrate certain things, and whenever this is the case, I will use those images preferentially, in the interests of clarity and/or comparison.
Illustrations, drawings, and reference photographs will, whenever necessary, as much as is possible, be altered to reflect existing conditions as the pad was being initially constructed, when I was taking the included photographs, as opposed to how the pad came to be finally configured in its final form.
As an example, I shall make mention again about the OWP system, which is included on the abovereferenced demolition drawings, but had not so much as been imagined when we were first fabricating and erecting the RSS at Pad B, using Drawing 79K14110 to do so. The OWP system in its final form is a massive contraption of a thing, over forty feet high by one-hundred fifty feet long by thirty feet deep, comprising numerous heavy steel supports and gigantic panels which swung and slid on bearings and rollers, comprising too many separate elements to enumerate individually, that hangs off of the front of the RSS as well as the north side of the FSS, and as far as possible, I have removed that part of the OWP, which wasn't there during my stay on the pad, as much as possible, from any excerpted drawings which include it for any reason, that might be linked to later on in the balance of this material.
And, just to complicate matters a bit further, numerous parts of the OWP were included in what we were constructing, and do show up in the photographs, but for which I have no technical drawings to refer to. The difficulty and problems go both ways, and serve to illustrate the concept that the Pad was never really a place, but was instead, a process. This sort of thing can become deeply confusing, and any given history of things can only be a snapshot. Can only be a series of snapshots. And the overall movie never stopped running. And things never quit changing as time went by.
OWP, in a bewildering array of manifestations, will loom large in much of what comes. But not right now. It is too soon. We must work our way through to it properly, so as we can better understand the fullness of it when the time comes to give it the closer looks it shall be given.
The GOX Arm Hurricane Lock is another substantial structure shown on some of the demo drawings, which wasn't there during my stay, when we were initially building the pad. And of course there are plenty of other examples of this sort of thing, too many to enumerate individually here and now, many of which will loom large in the images and recounting of events surrounding them to come. Many of the images that you might find on the internet, perhaps trying to learn more about Pad B, will include things that will never receive mention in what follows below.
The complexity of the process is daunting, and I understand this. Complex things and complex processes will yield to only so much by way of simplification in the interests of communication, and no more. I will do the best I can with communicating the nature of fiendishly-interlocking things and processes which alter both in their own nature, as well as the nature of the way in which they interlock, as time progresses forward. I can do no more than that, alas.
Basically, I want everything to match as closely as possible, the photographic images I am including in this series of essays, which show only those things which were there at the time, when the photographs were taken.
And the photographic images which properly begin on page 3 of this treatise are astoundingly detailed and complex.
You are about to enter a Great Forest of Steel, populated by the people who designed and built it, the like of which you cannot imagine, and we're going to learn about all of it to a level of detail which will quite literally be taking us, when necessary, all the way down to the individual nuts, bolts, and welds which hold it all together.
You want to know?
You're going to know!
But this forest is vast, and therefore requires a vast amount of description to give you enough information for understanding, and the amount of information which you will be absorbing in the coming pages is too large to bear repeating, anywhere, and for this reason, each and every page you read will only contain new material and presume that you have read the words and viewed the images contained in all of the preceding pages which came before it, and that you further understood what you read and saw, or otherwise this already very-long and very-detailed treatment of our subject matter will collapse under its own weight.
Go slow. Be easy on yourself. Take it in small bits, one at a time. Put it down. Often. Pick it back up. Later. Reread. Relook. Re-examine. As-necessary. Often. Until you can feel a slow-creeping sense of comfort and familiarity with things beginning to settle into the back of your mind.
We are about to embark upon a subject which took a huge army of this nation's most talented people the better part of a decade to envision and implement, and a thing like that will not yield to an examination which is in any way, to any degree, cursory.
Skim if you want. Click the hundreds of embedded links randomly to admire the interesting artwork (and is artwork, and a very beautiful class of artwork at that) you might find there, as expressed in structural engineering drawings, if you want.
By all means feel free to do so, and I put this thing together with that approach in mind, also.
But if you want to actually know...
...well then...
And while I'm forewarning you of things, I suppose I'd better address the issue of acronyms, while I'm at it here, right up front, too.
You've already had to deal with acronyms on this page, in the form of the RSS and the FSS, the conjoined fraternal twins which constitute the core of things that follow herein, and, just to make it a little more interesting, those two items further illustrate the complexities introduced and compounded by the renaming of things, by their creators and by their users, as the overall projects within which they were situated rolled forward.
This series of essays is going to just be riddled with acronyms, so get ready for it. I will do what I can to explain each new acronym as it is first encountered, or shortly thereafter. Which means those acronyms which we will be encountering later on in the essays, will be presumed understood, and will rarely be re-explained. Those who skip through the essays haphazardly will constantly be butting their heads against unexplained acronyms which had been introduced earlier, explained at that time, with no further explanations to be had. Make notes. Write it down. Google it. Do whatever you have to, so as you will have understating as the stories unfold. Acronyms are bewildering things and are never fun to have to learn, and, speaking personally, I do not like them (or any other form of opaque lingo), but they serve a purpose, and that purpose is brevity, and that's why they are used by the people who use them.
Who wants to write (or read) "Orbiter Mid-Body Umbilical Unit" over and over again, when you can use "OMBUU" over and over again? Nobody, that's who. Acronyms can be painful to the uninitiated, but they're there for a reason, and make for a little less long-windedness here and there, so I'm going to be speaking our native language which was used by myself and by all the other the participants at the time, and that native language carries a heavy burden of acronyms.
I've created a page containing the acronyms that NASA was using during the Space Shuttle program, and I'm going to place a link to that page right HERE. And I'll put another link to that page of acronym definitions down at the bottom of every subsequent page in this series, too.
Language constitutes one of the most fundamental building-blocks of a culture, and in what follows, you are going to be learning a lot about the culture which the construction of Pad B was embedded within.
An immediate aspect of language that many who read what follows will find difficult to deal with, will be the units of measurement that are used, and of course, this being a large-scale construction project undertaken in the United States during the 1980's, we find ourselves using an unwieldy system that includes things like pounds, feet, inches, and all the rest of an infuriatingly Medieval system that remains with us yet, handed down, person-to-person, through the accumulating centuries along a tortuously frayed and braided path, parts of which lead all the way back to the Roman Empire, none of whom ever so much as imagined anything as large and complex as a Space Shuttle, and the launch pad it stands upon, primed and ready to leap above the clouds into the black-sky realm where stars reside.
The drawings, the specifications, and the words on the lips of everyone involved, used and referred to these units of measurement and so shall all that follows herein.
For those of you who are used to the vastly more-sensible metric system, all I have to offer are apologies, alas.
Culture provides context, and without context, history loses meaning, and without meaning, what's the point of trying to construct a sensible history in the first place? If you wish to know about the construction of the Pad, you must know about the people who constructed it, and so you shall.
Culture is people and I shall be describing people, and what they were doing, and why they were doing it, as I go, too. Some of you may find that aspect of things tedious. Some of you are solely interested in the pad itself, not the people who worked there. But others of you will want more by way of cultural context, and that will be provided via descriptions of the people. The human beings who showed up every day, interacted with each other, and did the work. An awful lot of how and why boils down to who. So we're including that aspect of things too.
Additionally, when first embarking upon this work, I discovered that the vagaries of color-cast damage to old photographic prints which which were taken forty years ago can be amazingly varied and subtle, and can also vary strongly, even between scanned images that were taken mere minutes apart and photographically developed as part of a single roll of film, and which have been placed on the same page of the photo album, and scanned simultaneously.
Why this might be so, I cannot know.
But it's certainly there, and I have certainly had to deal with it, and that brings up another issue.
What constitutes "true color" when it comes to restoring these images?
The short answer is that there is no answer!
And my memory, while being pretty damn good, I'm told, is certainly not "photographic" and therefore I find myself having to take my best shot at it, and having to be satisfied with simply doing the best I can.
And there's more.
Much of the color-cast damage consists in alterations to hue, saturation, and value, which change, and are altered, across the breadth of a single image in such a way as to preclude global corrections to "true" for any given image.
And at this point, once I realized that unfortunate truth, I chose to simply "do the best I can" with each image, and let it go at that.
Links to the original scans will be provided, full-size, for anyone who might wish to improve on what I've done by myself, and please be advised that I'm not a professional at this sort of thing, so I would expect that someone with a proper set of skills could make major improvements upon what you will be seeing herebelow.
What follows is just about one-half, as entertaining a personal history as I could write, and one-half, a full-tilt technical document. The technical parts can get hairy, and I'm fully aware of that. But if you want to know what went on, if you want to understand the Pad, then you need to understand things in their fullness, and since, after all, we were building a launch pad, which is a thing that gets used by rocket scientists, well... yeah, it's gonna get a little technical every so often.
And so, without too much further delay, let us get to the photographs, and the stories which go with them.
Let us enter the world of steely-eyed Union Ironworkers who risk their lives daily, walking high steel, building the launch pad which, one day, dragons will be flying from.
Let us enter the world of designers and engineers who must render the unimaginable into a physical reality of drawings and written words which can then be further rendered into concrete and steel and operated by everyday people like you and me.
Let us enter the world of government contracts and specifications, of money and of programs, and those who manage and implement them, in an arena of fierce competition, and equally-fierce cooperation.
Let us enter the world of the great fire-breathing dragons which fly above the atmosphere ten times faster than a rifle bullet, carrying a cargo of exotic equipment along with the brave people who bet their very lives on them and dare to ride inside of them.
Let us go.
Let us go there now.
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