The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B

A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.

Page 8: Of Stub Clusters and Stair Towers. Of Heavy Pipes, and Framing Steel. And Hinge Columns, too.

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And this might be our very best image of the RSS's bones, of its yet-to-be-covered-up framework, and I am going to treat it accordingly, so get ready for it, because here it comes.

This is an image of forces, written in steel.

You can almost feel the hugely-powerful urge of gravity, as it mightily, with overwhelming multi-million pound brute force, tries to bring it all down.

To smash every last bit of it into a pile of hopeless wreckage, bent, broken, twisted, jumbled, and strewn across the ground.

And you can just as equally almost sense the groaning resistance of the steel, as it fights its unending battle with gravity, never sleeping, never stopping, not so much as for a split-second, as it disagrees with the titanic forces seeking to both tear it down immediately, and to tear it down over time through additional forces of flexure, compression, tension, torsion, expansion and contraction, ever-creeping corrosion, and the desire for cracks to form, to sunder, to weaken, and to ultimately destroy that which you see here implacably remaining upright, against it all, against the sky.

They design these things from the top down.

And as you cascade lower and lower through the bones and muscles of it all, you find yourself adding to the forces which seek to flatten it against the cold hard face of the ground.

And by the time you've cascaded all the way down to where, as it must eventually, it touches the ground, you have accumulated a staggering amount of differing forces, all doing their very best to render that which you have designed into a chaos of meaningless and purposeless scrap iron, fit only to be returned to the earth from which it originally came, or perhaps back into the furnace from which it was born, to be born again, for purposes unknowable and unseeable.

Perhaps consider these sorts of things, the next time you drive across a great bridge. Or pass beyond the tenth floor, upward bound in an elevator cab. Or employ steel sinews in any other way, to keep things from coming undone.

It all just sits there.

Except that it doesn't.

It is locked, every last bit of it, in a fierce battle for survival.

And when you enter into it, whatever it may be, you become part of that battle, too.

A battle for your very survival, against unsleeping forces that seek to end it all.

Stub clusters.

We have talked about them before.

And we shall now talk about them again.

Let us use this image to talk about stub clusters.

Let us talk about the stub cluster at elevation 171'-2" on Column Line A-6, (mind the opposite hand, ok?) which is plainly-visible in the photograph at the top of this page. Here it is again, here on S-27 (again, opposite hand), seen from the side. And here it is here on S-22, for a third and final time, in plan view (and yep, since we're looking at it from below in the photograph, once again it's opposite hand).

Look closely at all three of the drawings for this area (and it takes all three to fully show this stub cluster), and make note of the very small "dash" mark running perpendicularly through the line of the pipe, which is rendered right next to the center of the cluster, on each pipe. These "dashes" are noted on all three drawings as "FIELD SPLICE" and each "dash" represents where one pipe gets welded, in the field, up in the air, by one of Wilhoit's ironworkers, to its mating piece.

As we already know, Sheffield Steel produced and shipped this main framing, and Wilhoit erected it.

And it is a ferociously complex concatenation of structural pipes (Ironworkers would occasionally call them "O-beams," as opposed to "I-beams.") and a few big wide-flange members, which forms the main framing (as in it held everything else up) of the RSS. The way that all these heavy iron pipes come together results in a nightmare of exceedingly complex curved and beveled cuts and full-penetration welds to get the full tonnage of the whole thing to snugly fit together properly, on-center, without error, to transfer the frightfully heavy loads produced by the weight of the entire finished structure down to solid ground in a safe and reliable manner.

Get a look at Detail 'D' on drawing S-29 which is referred to from multiple different drawings (and that fact can be ascertained by virtue of the little 'dot' to the left of the notation "S29" underneath that detail, which of course gives no particular number as to where this particular detail is coming "from" and let us not launch off into a discussion of having to occasionally chase that kind of thing down when going over the drawings, but let it be known that yes, once in a while it became great terror-filled fun, hoping you weren't missing something, and hoping again you weren't missing something expensive too), which detail 'D' gives us a close look at our Elevation 171'-2" A-6 pipe connection which I showed with a label pointing to it on the photograph, just a few paragraphs ago.

It is a thing beyond believing.

And yet, there it sits, right in front of us.

One of many.

In the shop, in Palatka, Florida, Sheffield Steel had to take raw steel structural pipe, plain, from the mill, and render it into things like this pipe connection.

We're talking 1979, or perhaps the very early months of 1980, as the period of time when the fabrication of this heavy iron was underway, and all of this was done in the shop with pencil and paper, maybe a desk calculator, maybe a slide rule(!), using custom-built one-off templates and jigs, and the instincts of a couple of the old-timers to work out the details of it all, torch-cut, bevel and contour, finish-grind and prep, precision-fit and rigidly-clamp the large and awkward tonnage of pipe stubs together, and then hand it off to their best master craftsmen welders to turn sweat, amps, fumes, hiss and crackle, molten metal, burn-inducingly intense ultraviolet light, and a delicate touch, into a single massive solid object by hand.

No computers. No robotics. No automatic cutting or welding rigs. No nothing.

Just some old guys in a dim, noisy, smoke-filled hall, going at it bare-handed.

The amount of skill and work required to produce a thing like this is vastly greater than you might imagine.

My respect for those people knows no bounds. None. None at all.

Go back and look at that thing again, dammit.

We're talking heavy iron here.

Maybe go get a few cardboard inserts for paper-towel rolls. Can't need more than a couple of dozen of 'em right? That way you'll have some spares.

You'll be needing those spares.

Now go get your exacto knife, or, if you're feeling adventurous, just a pair of scissors, and then cut curves into the ends of those cardboard tubes so as they all come exactly together at your toy stub cluster, no gaps, no interference, centerline-dead-into-centerline, every angle on every diagonal dead-nuts, for every last one of them. Keep in mind, please, that you can completely ignore any considerations of bevel, be it single or be it compound, which of course is going to make your work a lot easier. And while we're at it, we can also ignore considerations of different diameters for our paper-towel rolls, greatly furthering our ease of doing this. And before you start cutting, be sure and calculate, with a slide rule, on a sheet of paper, by hand, all of the angles for all of the diagonals, using the dimensions between stub clusters as given on the contract drawings. Correctly, please. Determine which pipe gets cut away to accommodate which other pipe, too. Correctly, I might add. And then, when you're done doing that, be sure and calculate the sequence of assembly, and the sequences of welding, from first pipe to last, too. And yeah, you gotta do that one correctly as well.

Did you have enough paper-towel rolls? Or did you ruin every single one of them, and wind up throwing the whole damn mess away in frustration?

Yeah.

Now go get some nice heavy iron. Weighing up to 224 pounds per running foot in this particular instance, and do it using that. In a place where there's real money riding on the outcome.

Yeah.

I thought so.

Now go back and look at that photograph. Again.

And maybe think about what's going on where those pipes are all coming together.

And I would walk out of the Sheffield Steel field trailer, and this would be staring me right in the face, and maybe at the end of my workday I would be standing there in the afternoon, maybe just before getting into my little yellow VW Bug, just before winding around through the lengthening shadows to the Beach Road and the drive home past all the other launch pads on Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral, and I would consider stuff like this, and occasionally a shiver would run down my spine as the sheer magnitude and intensity of what was arrayed all there before me, set in.

The people who did this sort of thing were walking and working, all around me.

And they didn't look a bit special, or otherwise worthy of the least additional interest above and beyond what you might give to any other assemblage of strangers and acquaintances.

But they were different.

And, I suppose, slowly, ever so slowly and creepingly, I was becoming different, too.

I dunno. I try to explain. People always ask me "What was it like?" People want to know how it felt. People want to know what was going on from a personal point of view. From the standpoint of one of the participants.

And so I try to answer them. I try to answer them as honestly as I can.

I try to tell them what it was like.

But I don't think I'm doing a very good job of it.

I do not know.

Heavy pipes.

My very first foray out onto high steel, the very first one ever, one crisp clear morning in the spring of 1980, which I am remembering right now with an involuntary shiver, as if it happened this morning, involved me having to go twenty or thirty feet across the top of one of the 24 inch pipes at the 135' level, shown here on S-21, between the Hinge Column and column line A along the back of the RSS, through an area beyond the temporary scaffolding which had gotten me across the FSS Struts to a place just past the Hinge Column, where there was nothing whatsoever anywhere near or around me to grab hold of or lean up against, or even safely fall onto, and let me tell you, that curved round upper surface of the pipe is WAY more scary and dangerous than the nice flat level surface of a normal steel I-beam, which is plenty scary enough on its own for a first-timer, but I gulped hard, told myself to ignore the panic-inducing distance to the cool morning concrete and grass I could see a hundred feet beneath me as placid background for that awfully-curving top surface of the pipe, and Red Milliken, Wilhoit's general foreman, who saw the terror in my eyes, was extra careful and patient with me, and, unspeaking, wordlessly, afforded me a grace to find and build the confidence to do what needed to be done on my own terms, which I somehow manged to do, reaching deep inside myself, finding still more things down in there which, up to this moment, I had never before in my whole life so much as imagined might exist, and in the end all was well, but for a short while there..... in transit..... mid-span..... you cannot imagine.  You.  Can.  Not.  Imagine.  A thing such as this you must know by having gone through it for yourself, or you can not know it at all. Ironworkers, who can, with good reason, be classified as some of the harshest and roughest people on earth, also can, upon occasion, be deeply caring for the health and well-being of a fledgling, trying its wings out for the first time. These guys know, and really, that's all there is to it, and all that needs to be said about it.

Wilhoit's crew of union ironworkers was sterling in general, and Red was as good as it gets, in particular.

I mentioned at the top of this page that this might be "our very best image of the RSS's bones" and we've already talked about that sort of thing when we worked our way down the shipping list, and this image constitutes a good opportunity to see where some of the items on the shipping list, which we looked at on various drawings, are located on the real tower, in the real world, and in so doing, gain additional experience and familiarity with the elements of its construction, and the overall way those elements all fit together to perform their individual tasks, as part of the overall task of servicing the Space Shuttle.

The items in question, for your review, can be found here, and we will start at the top of this short list and work downward, looking at those items which are visible in the photograph at the top of this page.

RCS Room. And as a reminder of the scale of things, as a reminder of the overall perspective of things, keep in mind that you're looking at a three-story house, half of which is hanging out over empty space on its front side, with a one hundred sixty foot free drop beneath its floor, unobstructed, all the way down to the concrete of the pad deck beneath it. So... yeah. Mind your step, ok?

PBK and Contingency Platforms. And while we're here, please be advised that in many instances, where I'm using the original photograph to show things that I'm also showing on the 79K contract drawings, things will not quite agree with what's shown on the drawing, and this can be for a multiplicity of reasons, individually and in combination, and in some cases the apparent "discrepancies" might be quite significant.

To begin with, the photographs themselves are woefully inadequate. They are forty years old. They were taken with a small, non-specialty camera, my foldable Zeiss Ikon Contessa, having no specialized lens, using common film, developed at the local photo store, placed in a photo album, and then scanned into a computer decades later, and we're asking for a LOT here, and we're doing the best we can here, but we only have what we have and we have no more than that, and my regret is deep, but there is not a damn thing I can do about any of it, and I shall work with what I've got, and I shall do the best I can, and that's all I'll ever be able to do.

Additionally, light and shadow, intervening steel, background steel, handrails, temporary scaffolds, ropes hoses rigging and whoknowswhat, the angle the photo was taken from, and no end of other things can and will, do their best to confound and confuse, and once again, we're doing the best we can, and that's all we'll ever be able to do.

And if that's not enough, sometimes the drawings show things differently, too. Sometimes they include things that do not appear in the photograph. Or things appear in the photograph that are not on the drawing. Perhaps the construction was incomplete. Perhaps there was a modification. Perhaps something simply got removed. Or added. Or any number of other strange and peculiar variations on the overall theme of the RSS. And if you think it's hard to make proper sense of these photographs, vis-à-vis the contract drawings, maybe some time you should try building one of these things. It's not easy, ok? The miracle is that any of this is working at all, nevermind that it's not working as well as we'd like it to.

Hangers Framing and Ladders, elevation 100 to 211. And most of this is not going to show, but a little of it does, so we at least get to see some of it, running vertically for a pretty good ways, over near the Hinge Column, extending from just a bit past Line B (closer to us in the photograph), back toward Line A (farther away), but even that is pretty hard to pick out from the welter of surrounding vertical, horizontal, and diagonal framing members which are either blocking most of it from view or are adding so much visual confusion as to render it indistinguishable from its background, and my selection of areas to highlight is woefully inadequate, too, but that's where it is. Mostly. Sort of. Except for the parts that are completely hidden, back near Column Line 2. Here it is again here, on contract drawing A-1 (the 'A' stands for Architectural, which usually covers things like wall paneling, doors, finish roofs, and "lighter" stuff like that, but not always, and big drawing packages are generally broken into several large categories which can be easily identified by the letter that proceeds the drawing number, and in addition to 'A', you get 'C' for Civil, as in civil engineering, as in stuff that involves moving earth around for stuff like roadways and berms and swales and retention ponds and stuff like that, and 'E' for Electrical, and 'M' for Mechanical, which tends to be things that involve mechanisms but also includes all of the piping, tubing, ductwork, and etc. that you find all over the place, and other stuff too, and sometimes there is a fair bit of overlap with 'S',which is for Structural). HFL was one of those unfortunate things that, by the nature of what it was, and where it was, you could never get a proper look at all of it at the same time. It was threaded through everything else in a way that simply would not allow it to be depicted as a single, whole, item, and this is an issue that we will encounter elsewhere, with other things, in other places, too, so let this be your introduction to stuff like that, ok?

Vehicle Access Platforms. And these had yet to be erected, and do not exist on our photograph.

SRB Access Platforms. And these too had yet to be erected, but a very small amount of the support steel, which is part of the catwalks that take you to the SRB Access Platforms on either side of the RCS Room, had been erected, and shows in the photograph, and here it is here, so you can see it.

Catwalk, elevation 211 to 220. Another one that's shown in only a very limited way, and even what little is shown is not very easy to pick out from its surroundings, and it's another one of those things which does not properly show on a single drawing, and instead is broken into separate renderings on separate sheets. S-5 shows us the part of the catwalk which is over on the FSS side, up above the struts, beyond the Hinge Column Upper Bearing, complete with elevation-view section cuts, but then you have to go over to S-42 to get a look at the rest of it, and even that is incomplete, and for the elevation-view section cuts that show the support framing underneath it, you then have to jump over to S-57. And yeah, this one was a pain in the ass to deal with when we were building it, too, in case you were wondering. However, disregarding any of that, one thing this photograph does manage to do is to convey the very exposed location of both ends of the catwalk on this, the Flame Trench Side of things, cantilevered way the hell out over completely open space, and yes indeed, both perches were a treat to visit, offered spectacular views of the surround, and further offered a surprising amount of isolation from the rest of the people working on the towers, despite the fact that both perches were side branches of a main trafficway between the towers, and this pair of locations was another one of my favorite haunts whenever time, circumstance, and The Hand of Fate chose to bestow upon me a visit up there.

Square Platform. Sigh. As I mentioned earlier on Page 6, I have no recollection of this one. No idea what, no idea where. So we're not going to be getting very much accomplished with locating it on our photograph right now, I'm afraid. Sigh.

Catwalk, elevation 163. The OMBUU Catwalk. Which, as with all the rest of this stuff, you've seen it before on the contract drawings, and drawing A-17, when used in conjunction with the photograph on this page, gives us a textbook example of how we need to be extremely careful when using these drawings to find our way around. Also, just so you know, on the photograph, the part of the OMBUU Catwalk attached to the FSS is not visible, because it has not yet been erected. All you get is the RSS side of it, ok? Nothing else.

And drawing A-17 is wrong. Badly wrong. Actually, it's not even wrong. It's actually impossible.

A-17 wants you to know (among many other things, all of which are right, so you gotta watch that, too) there's a catwalk at elevation 163'-9" which extends all the way across from the area of the Struts on the FSS to the face of the RSS, and there is of course, and it takes you to the OMBUU (or it will, once somebody finally fabricates and installs the goddamned OMBUU, which has not happened yet). All well and good.

And on A-17, the OMBUU Catwalk is just as plain as the nose on your face... except that it's not. Engineering drawings go to great lengths to eliminate "extraneous" information, in a desire to remove as much clutter as possible from an already-overcluttered rendering, and in the case of this particular elevation view, there is no depth perception whatsoever. You could stare at the elevation view on A-17 until your eyeballs fell out of your head, and you'd never guess that the OMBUU Catwalk heads away from its termination point mid-face on the RSS at a funny angle, where the OMBUU itself is not shown, and has not yet been installed, and then, after straightening up for a bit, the catwalk suddenly jerks away at a 90-degree angle which is only visible via the plan view on 79K14110 sheet S-36 and then it disappears completely into the forest of steel, deep within the external envelope of the RSS, which is exactly what you're seeing happen in the photograph at the far right end of the catwalk. Except that they've compounded the problems with A-17 by placing the RSS at a disorientingly partial state of rotation on that drawing, with the face of the RSS lined up perfectly square and parallel with the side of the FSS that faces the Flame Trench, with the OMBUU Access Catwalk extending across (incorrectly) in front of the Hinge Column, and... no.

And I went to a fair amount of time and trouble to show you how this would look in the real world, if you were looking straight down on the OMBUU Access Catwalk from up above it in similar fashion to they way everything else gets looked at in plan view, and I took 79K14110 sheet S-4 (which is the FSS side of things) and doctored it up, and then I took S-36 (which is the RSS side of things) and doctored it up, and then I merged them together, to show you how things would really look (using their own drawings to do so), if you pulled the RSS around into the daffy intermediate partially-rotated position that A-17 is trying to tell you it's showing you things in.

You will never encounter the RSS sitting still in this position. Ever. Yes, it's nice for letting us see a single span all the way across the face of the RSS and the face of the Struts, but... no. And it introduces way more problems than it will ever ameliorate, and in so doing, they got it wrong and with the RSS in this ridiculous non-position, the two halves of the OMBUU Catwalk would be split completely apart from one another, with a large empty space between the two halves, but whoever drew this up either said, "Fuckit" and extended the lines on paper that represent the OMBUU Access Catwalk all the way across, even though they knew what they were doing was wrong, or... they just missed it. Missed it clean. And I really do not know which of these two possibilities I like the least, but either way A-17 stands as a shining beacon alerting us to be careful when we're looking at this stuff, because...

...sometimes they get it not just wrong, but badly wrong.

So. The contract drawings are good. The best. But. The tendency for humans to look directly at things, and think they know what they're looking directly at, even when they don't, is a force to be reckoned with, and a pitfall that must never be dismissed casually. And yes, this kind of perceptual stuff and the involuntary psychology that goes along with it, was an ever-present issue when we were constructing things. It's not always what you think it is. It's not always what you know it is. Beware.

Top Truss. Which, remember, is not level, and instead slopes sharply downward from it's nominal elevation of 208'-2" at Column Line 6, to elevation 171'-2" at Column Line 7.

Catwalk, elevation 211. Which is around on the back side of the RSS, running along Column Line A, and is not visible in our photograph.

We have by this stage of our journey come a long way in our understanding of the Rotating Service Structure, haven't we?

Yes. Yes we have. We have indeed.

And for those of you who are in this for the long run, and who are finding this stuff not all that difficult to mentally visualize, and to see how it all fits together, both on the drawings and in the photographs, and who are furthermore young enough to still be in school, or still be able to return to school (which is a thing I did after age 30, as a direct result of being instructed to do, by my boss, Richard Walls, and that story is coming up shortly), then perhaps you might want to bear down on your math curriculum, and the associated classes and programs which branch complexly out into the various fields of engineering and science, because there just might be real money out there somewhere for you, to go along with doing real work and making real discoveries, and if one day you get to work on rocket ships or the launch pads they hurl themselves above the clouds from... well... that would be pretty cool too, wouldn't it?

And since we've already come this far, and since we're already beginning to develop a workman's familiarity with the RSS, let us continue further along that path and continue to use the excellent image of the RSS's bones, and point out more of those things you've already been shown on the contract drawings, in the real world, so you can see how it all works together.

Up to this point we've seen a lot of the Primary Framing, fully-exposed, and now we'll get to see it as the rest of the tower is filling in, all around it.

Column Line 7 is primary framing steel, and it holds up the whole tower over on the far side, away from the Hinge Column. You've seen it in the contract drawings a few times already, and you're looking at it face-on in elevation view, here on S-28 (mind the slope away, from elevation 171'-2" to 208'-2"), and edge-on, also in elevation view, here on S-25.

But a thing (there are many others, too) that those contract drawings for the Column Line 7 primary framing steel very specifically refuse to take into account (see above re: Engineering drawings go to great lengths to eliminate "extraneous" information) is Stair Tower 3 (shown here in elevation view on S-27), and this stair tower is wrapped around, and inside of, Column Line 7 (S-27 again, this time with Column Line 7 highlighted) below the 135' level in a way that can cause substantial confusion when looking at it with your eyes, trying to decipher what is, and what is not, a proper part of the Column Line 7 primary framing steel, and this also turns out to be, in somewhat similar fashion to the OMBUU Catwalk we dealt with a short time ago, a textbook example of the pitfalls you will constantly be encountering as you look at photographs of the RSS (and all the rest of the pad, too), attempting to identify and/or make sense of that which may be plainly-visible on the photograph, but which still manages to refuse to become understandable, even as you are staring right at it.

So.

We have to take all of this into account, and if we're just skimming along, "looking at the pretty pictures," well then that's fine and dandy, but if we're attempting to make proper sense of what our eyes are showing us, then we begin learn how to actually use our eyes, in differing ways, depending on the situation we find ourselves in, and we learn to slow way down, and examine each and every detail that we can see, to make damn good and sure it all fits together as a coherent, sensible, whole.

And in those places where it refuses to fit together as a coherent sensible whole, well then, those are the places that are shouting right out loud, telling us to stop.

To reconsider.

To look closer.

Much closer.

And to put in the hard work and concentration that are actually required to gain real understanding, and if and when certain elements never do submit to our hard work and concentration, then that's good too, because it allows us to make a mental note to ourselves, advising ourselves where the gaps in our understanding lie, and perhaps we can revisit things later on and finally make good sense out of it, and perhaps not, and either way, we wind up with greater understanding, including a greater understanding of ourselves, as to that which we know, and that which we do not know.

Most people have great difficulty with the concept of knowing what they don't know, and that particular phrase tends to disrupt them in ways that cause them to either gloss over it, or ignore it, or even reject it completely, but in the end, it's quite possible to know an awful lot about what you don't know, and those of us who put in the work to figure this one out, tend to gain advantages over those who do not, and... yeah. It's good stuff. All the way around.

But try to remember that when you're dealing with somebody who cannot grasp this concept, you will be doing yourself no favors in attempting to persuade them otherwise, or trying to take them to a place that is far beyond their own narrower horizons, and instead you must let them find their own way. Or not. And simply accommodate your own actions and circumstances to suit, and continue to move forward, with or without them.

So there's a lot of really cool stuff going on here that has nothing whatsoever to do with launch pads, Space Shuttles, construction projects, structural steel, or any of the rest of that kind of stuff, and it's like being awarded a hefty stash of bonus points or something, completely unexpectedly, when you start keying in on all this other peripheral stuff.

Or at least that's how it worked for me anyway, and I'm always getting hit with "How'd you learn all this stuff?" whenever I find myself telling someone about the pad, and the Space Shuttle, and all the rest of it, and clearly, since people keep asking about that end of it, then it becomes a part of my job, to try and convey it to people, in a usable fashion, so that hopefully, they can figure out how to "learn all this stuff" too, wherever they may find themselves.

So ok.

So fair enough.

Now, where were we?

Oh yeah, Stair Tower 3.

And Stair Tower 3's whole purpose in life was Emergency Egress.

As in, "Let's get the hell out of here, NOW, before whatever the hell is going on over there blows us up, or poisons us, or dissolves us, or sets us on fire, or freezes us rock-solid in an instant, and when we fall, we shatter like glass, or asphyxiates us, or....."

Holy shit!

And yeah, that's the exact correct pronunciation, right there.

Holy shit.

There's stuff going on out here on this launch pad, that if it goes wrong, it can go wrong in ways that most people are unable to even imagine, how a thing like that could even happen in the first place.

How a thing like that could even be real.

And oh yes, it's real.

All too real, in fact.

And so, the people who design this kind of stuff must keep in mind that every once in a while, things go wrong, and when they do, there must be avenues of escape, and yes, if the whole Space Shuttle suddenly erupts into a massive thundercloud of poison fire (what a concept!) while we're out here minding our own business at work one day, hotfooting it over toward Column Line 7 and running down Stair Tower 3 to the ground, and further running as far away as we can, is very probably not going to work. Time's up! Game over! Next contestant, please.

But if perhaps a valve on the Forward RCS Thrusters fails, and they start spilling hypergol by the gallon, then yes indeed, it might turn out that the foresight which caused our good friend Stair Tower 3 to be included as a legitimate part of the overall project, way over there at the far end of things, way over there on Column Line 7, then it might turn out that that was a very good idea indeed, and we successfully got the hell out of there before it had a chance to finish us off.

For anywhere on the RSS, getting off of the tower, escaping away from anything horrible that was going on over toward the Hinge Column side of the RSS and/or anywhere at all on the FSS, or even the Space Shuttle itself and the whole MLP it was sitting on whenever the RSS was in the demate position, then Stair Tower 3 was where you'd eventually find yourself, in your mad dash (but they always told you to "remain calm") to get the hell out of there.

But in fact, nobody ever used it.

For any thing.

At any time.

It was way the hell out there, more or less completely detached from the rest of the tower.

All by itself.

All alone.

And it was a perfectly splendid place to go.

When Fate said "You may go," I would go.

And take it all in, from up on high. Undisturbed. At peace.

There were places up on the tower. Places beyond believing, where the flow of life would halt, and the good air would fill your lungs. And the all-consuming quiet would fill your ears. And your thoughts would grow still and untroubled as your eyes drank it all in, all around you.

And Stair Tower 3 was one of those places.

Stair Tower 4 did not enjoy 3's splendid isolation and grand horizon-spanning vistas, but it's job was exactly the same, and that job was emergency egress as shown on A-45. Here it is again on S-73, viewed from "behind" with the Line B Primary Framing highlighted, and please note the column line numbers up at the very top, just for a little bit more by way of orienting yourself.

And Stair Tower 4 might or might not be on your pathway to Stair Tower 3..... depending.

The area which Stair Tower 4 concerned itself with providing escape from was much more limited.

Essentially, Stair Tower 4 was for getting personnel off of the RSS Roof area, or out of the Payload Changeout room, but only on the Column Line 7 side of the PCR, although you also might find yourself using it from a few of the Vehicle Access Platforms over on the Line 7 side of things too, and of course, the vagaries of things like red clouds of poison gas swirling around, coming your way on a gentle tropic breeze, or perhaps the exact location and direction of travel of things that were on fire, might also cause you to take a less than obviously-direct route, getting far away, fast away, which, who knows, might also somehow include good old Stair Number 4.

Disasters, and the hurriedly-enacted measures for keeping them off of you, have individual sets of rules all their own, and the rules are made up on the spot, and get changed, on the fly, in fractions of seconds, so..... who knows?

Stair Tower 5 is sort of, but not really, visible in our photograph, but we find ourselves talking about stair towers right now, and stair towers go places, and the places they go covers a lot of ground all over the RSS, and learning about where they go is good for continued familiarization with the general arrangement and layout of the RSS. So we may as well keep right on going, and even though Stair 5 isn't properly visible in my photograph, its location is (and yes, I know that sounds weird, but bear with me here, ok?).

We're already familiar with a stair tower to provide escape from the Column Line 7 side of the PCR, and you would very reasonably expect that the poor schlubs over on the Hinge Column side of the PCR should also be given a fighting chance to save their lives too, and you would be right, and at this point somebody ought to be scratching their heads over the business of why people in the PCR over on the Hinge Column side of things might even be needing their own special stair to get the hell out of there in a hurry, in time of need, and if you're one of those people, well then... job well done.

So. We already know that Stair Tower 4 is over on the Line 7 side of the PCR and you can see on S-37 that Stair 5 is over on the Line 1 side of the PCR, and here they both are, in plan view, on S-37, so you can see how that works, and we're arbitrarily (more or less, and actually, I've got reasons) slicing through the PCR half way between its floor and ceiling, give or take, at elevation 175'-0", which is only just about three feet above the top surfaces of the heavy Primary Framing pipes that make up the RSS Main Framing Truss at elevation 171'-2".

And here they are again, with the overall PCR envelope highlighted in light blue, and the PCR Fixed Interior Platforms labeled, and it was these interior platforms that demanded two separate emergency egress stairs, because when you look at the drawing, you can see there's a gap in there between the platform sets, and although the Extensible Planks (we have yet to meet them photographically, but meet them we shall, have no fear) might be in a configuration, and/or the PGHM might be in a place and might additionally be in a configuration, with or without a payload in its grip, where you might be able to run across the gap to the other side, to get to the stair beyond the other side of the PCR, from where you were working on one of the Fixed Platform Levels (there were five of them, one above the other). Any and all of that might also very well not be the case, and if it was not, then you were trapped. And when rockets go wrong, being trapped is not a good thing, so the stairs had to be made the way they were.

Here's a fairly-detailed plan and isometric view of the PCR Interior Platforms on M-117, to kind of give you an idea of what was going on in here, but be advised that this is actually pretty misleading in that it does not show a lot of other stuff inside the Payload Changeout Room, not least amongst which is the PGHM, but there's plenty more besides that, too.

Here's an isometric view on M-48 giving us the entire system (pretty much everything except the stair towers), which includes a hell of a lot more stuff (the Payload Changeout Room was an insanely complicated thing) that we're not going to talk about right now, but we'll get to every last bit of it later on before I'm done with this, I promise.

Complicated enough yet?

No.

No it's not. It gets worse.

Notice please, that Stair Tower 4, in similar fashion as Stair Tower 3, way over there in the middle of nowhere out on Column Line 7, is a simple-minded thing consisting of a rectangular tower, filled up with stair risers and landings, all one above the other, and none of this should be any trouble for anybody to understand, except that Stair 5 was no such thing.

The PCR Elevator Lobby forced Stair 4 to be moved far enough away from things that it could be constructed simply, as a plain rectangular tower, but Stair 5 could not do that, owing to a welter of electrical and mechanical things over in its general vicinity, and so it went where it had to go, in the configurations it had to assume, and on every level, it's a little bit different from the levels above it and below it, and sometimes the stair risers go this way, and sometimes the stair risers go that way, and sometimes the emergency egress doorways leading to the stair are here, and sometimes they're there, and the overall effect is very confusing.

The nastily-cramped confines in which it was forced to dwell also caused Stair 5 to be a bastard insofar as it was less of a proper stair, and more of a ship's ladder really, and the steepness of the stair/ladder risers made the damn thing a fairly dangerous proposition to get up and down on, and this goes double if you were carrying something in one or, god forbid, both hands while traversing it.

I never liked Stair Tower 5, although as a means (the only means) of getting to the Vehicle Access Platform at elevation 191'-0" over on that side of the RSS, it was pretty cool, 'cause the view from that particular Vehicle Access Platform, and the catwalk running along the face of the RSS that takes you to it, was to die for, and it was also another one of those "splendid isolation" places that nobody ever went to (hell, nobody could ever even get to it), and which provided a strikingly-counterintuitive open-air sheltering cocoon of silence, peace, and tranquility that had to be experienced to be believed, but I still didn't like Stair Tower 5, anyway. Stair 5 was a bastard.

Since Stair 5 had to deal with a lot of intervening things (think cable trays and cable tray supports, think piping runs and pipe supports, and you won't go too far wrong) over on its side of the PCR, it had to be constructed to avoid all the interferences, and as a result, the stair risers did not remain in the same orientation all the way up, and that's one of the reasons why the laughably simple-minded structural drawing of Stair 5, drawing S-74, looks the way it does, absurdly over-simple, no actual stair showing, and just generally lacking. We will be learning more about bad drawings as we proceed through these essays, and this stands as an example of a more-common beast than you would prefer to be meeting, as you continue your journey of learning about how the Pad was built, and how this stuff is (not always as well as you'd like) done.

Which of course is why I haven't even tried to show you this on the photograph just yet, because it wouldn't make enough sense, on its own, and even after all of this (or perhaps because of it), it's still not going to be as sensible as we'd like it to be.

And we're just about ready to return to the photograph, but before we do, here's the whole setup, labeled, at elevation 175'-0" (and I'm using this elevation because there's less other framing at this elevation to confuse things, and also because it shows the Primary Framing at elevation 171'-2") which is one of the major drivers of other things needing to be moved around, and oriented, in the way they were, because primary framing always has the right-of-way, and if you go cutting holes in the primary framing to accommodate something else, the primary framing quits holding up the whole tower, which promptly falls to the ground with a great roar, and once that happens, you lose all interest in locating things like stair towers, emergency egress doorways, elevators and their lobbies, and all the rest of it, because..... no more tower.

So ok. So now we can go look at the photograph and see if we can find Stair 5 hidden within it.

Whew!

That was a lot.

So ok, so here it is.

Yeah right. Sure thing.

Ok, bear with me here on this one, we're not quite there yet, but we're definitely closing in on it.

What you're seeing in the link above, is the entire PCR cavity in the RSS.

The entire hollowed-out center of the RSS, which is in fact, it's heart.

And as we all know, hearts are hollow in general aspect, but there's stuff inside of 'em anyway, even though they're essentially an open space for doing work, and it is exactly the same with the RSS and it's heart, the PCR.

Now, having said all of that, I must further say that this particular photograph is way less than the best possible view.

But.

For now at least, the PCR is still exposed, and although it has been partially sided-in along its entire back wall, and about half-way (proceeding from the back, toward the front, floor-to-ceiling all the way) on both of its side walls, and although there is a LOT of framing in the way, blocking our view, we can still see all the way into things, all the way to the back wall, and although there's a lot of unsided PCR Girts blocking the view, and one of the PBK Platforms is in the way, and the Canister Guide Rail (we'll get to that too, later on) and its support framing are in the way, and there's other stuff in there, including a very long piece of temporary work scaffolding up near the top of the PCR, and visibility is therefore very reduced, we can still see in there, anyway. Barely. But just enough.

And on top of all that, my highlighting, my attempt to place your visual focus on the right place, is also very rough, and I know that it's impossible to do this perfectly, and I'm not even bothering with "perfect," and am instead, just kind of giving you the overall sense of things, with the sided-over portion of the near (Column Line 7) side of the PCR side wall excluded from the envelope I'm showing, so keep that in mind if the overall shape of things does not quite make proper sense. And not only that, the PCR has no ceiling in this picture, either. It just sort of goes up until it gets into the open RSS Roof and RCS Room Floor framing steel above the RSS Top Truss, and at that point it's just simply no longer the PCR, and that too can be a little confusing.

So bear with me here, pretty please.

Ok, back to the photograph.

Stair 5 is over on the far side of the PCR Cavity, over on the Hinge Column side of things, and is, for the most part, behind the white insulated-metal paneling that defines the PCR Walls over there, but you can see two of the emergency egress doorway cutouts pretty clearly, which lead toward Stair 5 from the (as-yet unbuilt) PCR Fixed Interior Platforms at Levels 1 and 5, and it's the corner column of the very-much unfinished skeletal framing of that whole PCR Fixed Interior Platform set which is blocking our view of the doorway cutouts for levels 2 through 4, although you can just see parts of those openings, peeking out from behind that column on either side of it, including a sliver of blue sky on the right-hand side of the cutout at Level 4, but you need to look pretty close at the full-size image to do so.

And here it is here, all nice and zoomed-in on, and labeled, so you can see where the doorways to Stair 5 actually are.

Of note, Stair 5 did not go all the way to the RSS Roof. Up there at elevation 211', on the Hinge Column side of things, the toe of the ramp to Crossover Catwalk Elevation 211' to 220' was pretty much in the exact same place as another landing for Stair 5 would have been, and people up there had the option to head toward, or away from, the FSS as options for heading down to the pad deck, getting the hell off the tower. Which is good. The thought of having to enter the disaster, to escape from it, is a chilling one, and multiple escape routes are the only way to avoid a thing like this when the planets all align "just so" against you.

Except for the folks who had to take Stair Tower 5 to get the hell out of there in a hurry.

With Stair Tower 5, it's strictly a one-way deal.

You go down, or you don't go, and while you're going down, you stay over there on the Hinge Column side of things, or you don't go.

And if you're up in that area, and the air has turned a sort of murky, dirty, dark reddish orange, somewhere down below you, and over toward the FSS too, then you've got a problem.

Little things.

It's always the little things.

And now I'm looking at the original picture up at the top of the page again, and it occurs to me that this is probably the best image I have of Wilhoit's Falsework, so let's give that a look too, while we're here.

By the time this photograph was taken, most of the Falsework had already been cut loose from the tower, but not all of it, and over on Column Line 6, which is the last line of the five total lines (corresponding to RSS Column Lines 2 through 6), it looks like it's still solidly connected, still doing its job of holding things up, and at Line 5 it looks like it's still connected back on RSS Column Line A, and maybe up front at Line B, too, but it's hard to tell.

The Falsework was originally built to carry the entirety of the RSS, and here's a picture of it looking down from the FSS at Elevation 140'-0", with Wilhoit's union ironworkers on it the morning they set the RSS Bottom Truss on top of it, as the Truss, in mid-lift, was just about to reach the level of the top of that Falsework (and that Truss was the first, and by far the largest, single piece of the RSS),
to let you see how the Falsework originally looked. (Photo credit: Eugene Hajdaj).

Note: The detailed story of this Lift can be found on Page 63, a little down below Image 083 on that page, and I recommend you read the whole page all the way down to that point first, so as you will better understand the business of lifts and will therefore better understand the RADICALNESS of what Wilhoit did when they lifted the RSS Bottom Truss, in one piece, and set it on top of the Falsework. So you're not getting that story now, but you will get that story, and it's a good one. Again, be sure and read down to it on Page 63, trying to absorb the ambience of heavy lifts. It's not just dry engineering and calculations. Not by far. It's an art, and skilled practitioners of The Art of Lifts are as much (or more) artists, who work with an extraordinarily dangerous medium, as they are simply steel erectors. Ask around. Ask anybody who's been in the business a while. They'll tell you the exact same thing. Lifts, done by the adepts, are radical. Radical Performance Art.

We will revisit Wilhoit's cunningly-devised system for temporarily holding up the RSS before it was complete enough to hold itself up, later on in these essays. More than once, even. But for now, we'll let all of this go, ok?

And let's get a good look at the Hinge Column, which defines the far side of the RSS as Column Line 1, and which, via a couple of whacking-big spherical bearings of a unique design which are attached to it, holds one whole two-million pound side of the RSS up in the air, and also keeps it from twisting or bending around front-to-back or side-to-side, when it's rotating, and when it's sitting still, too. This isn't the best photograph of it, by far, but we're at the best point in the narrative to introduce it to you, in detail, so that's what we're going to do. You'll be seeing it a lot in numerous photographs to come, so it's all good, ok?

Here's drawing 79K14110 sheet M-8, showing you the generalized overview of things with the whole RSS (kinda small renderings, but they're big enough, just), along with the reactions that the Hinge Column (and Line 7, which we'll get to, soon enough, but not on this page) has to deal with. Those reactions are the forces that bear down, across, and twist on things, and are expressed in "KIPS" which are units of 1,000 pounds each. A thousand KIPS is a Million Pounds. So we're dealing with some quite-heavy forces here, ok? Shit's gotta be strong to deal with these forces and not fail.

Wrapped around the Big Pipe of the column itself externally and welded directly to it, stacked like dinner plates here and there, a variety of crossover and access platforms can also be seen highlighted, and not all of them are complete, and instead consist in bare framing, without any deckplates or steel-bar grating on top of those bare frames.

But the two Bearings are the Main Event with the Hinge Column. There's one up at the very top, and another one farther down about half way to the Pad Deck, so let's take the first of what will be several deep dives into differing things and systems, sprinkled throughout these essays in the pages to come, and drill on down into the innermost guts of things and see how this pair of very large, and very unusual, bearings work.

And you'd best get ready, because the subject of bearings, all by itself, constitutes a fully-developed, complete, world. And inside of that world, there are whole continents, oceans, countries, cultures, isolated-tribes-of-bloodthirsty-savages-speaking-incomprehensible-languages, you name it. It is a HUGE place. Beyond imagining. Whole lifetimes get absorbed into its sub-sub-subsections and fractally-involute nooks and crannies. And we're not gonna be doing much more with that world other than kind of waving at it as we go by, but we need to know a just a little more about how bearings work, so as we can learn more about how our Rotating Service Structure works.

So we start out by learning that bearings work, very often (but dear lordygollamighty not always), by keeping a spinning shaft exactly where it belongs and nowhere else, without burning up from friction and causing a catastrophic failure, via the action of holding it firmly in place inside of some ring-shaped, or bowl-shaped, or otherwise physically-accommodating thing or other that lets it slide or spin around in there like the axle of a bicycle wheel spinning around inside of the bicycle frame you're sitting on top of, without letting it get away, going someplace we don't want it to go, tearing everything all to hell (including you) as it does so.

All well and good, and in our day-to-day lives, down here where things are small, bearings tend to have their spinning shaft separated from the the thing that holds it firmly in place, by a set of smallish balls, or rollers, or sometimes when the rollers are very narrow they're called needles, and those guys roll along held in place between a pair of Races, one outer race, and one inner race, all of which makes up the whole bearing. And that's how we get ball-bearings, and roller-bearings, and needle-bearings, and everything's made out of steel and it's all nice and strong, and the wheels don't fall off our cars while we drive them, and what could be nicer than that? And why are you going on and on about this anyway, MacLaren?

Stick around. Here it comes.

Starting right here it promptly gets complicated, because with the RSS we need to turn that "spinning shaft" description I just gave you inside out, and on the RSS the shaft stays put, and the thing being held firmly in place spins around, and we're entering a gigantic wilderness here, where it's very easy to get lost, and right now, for this particular case, in isolation, we're going to call ONLY the outer portions of our Hinge Column Bearings the Races (Like I just said, most bearings have outer and inner races, but not here, not now, not this time, ok? And I've already warned you about incomprehensible languages, too.), and because these are SPHERICAL bearings, we're going to be calling the inner portions of our Hinge Column Spherical Bearings the Balls. And no, these are NOT ball bearings! Not even close! So gird your loins for battle, because our foe is a fierce one, and cunningly-devious, too.

The two Main Framing trusses that define the sensible vertical extent of the RSS, one at 208'-2" (which we've already seen highlighted on our photograph), and the other one down at 134'-2" (which is buried in there, and we're not gonna get a proper look at it), both connect to the Hinge Column through those spherical bearings, without which, the RSS will be frozen in place, unable to move.

We'll do the Hinge Column Upper Spherical Bearing first. This is the Bearing that ties the RSS Top Truss at elevation 208'-2" to the Hinge Column. Just the Upper Bearing. Nothing else, ok?

And 79K14110 sheet M-2, viewed here in its raw, unrectified, unannotated original state so as you can see what I was dealing with at the outset, and also see some of the peculiarities of this particular sheet where the engineering kind of goes off the page a little bit down there in the lower left, will be your introduction to it. No, I cannot expect very many of you at all to make heads nor tails of it at this point, so we're simply starting from here, and then we'll work our way down into the guts of things one step at a time, and one of the most interesting of those things is that both bearings, Upper and Lower, were designed and constructed in a way that would have permitted their removal and replacement, in situ.

That never became necessary, but RS&H's original design very forgivingly included that possibility, just in case, and I've always thought that was really cool, considering the phenomenally-heavy loads those bearings were burdened with at all times. "Yeah, we'll just jack it up a teency wee little bit, and yank out this bearing here that was carrying 2 million pounds of weight a few hours ago, and replace the sonofabitch and button it all back up, and then let back down with the jacks, and tra la la, easy peasy, there you go."

Whoa!

So it's nice to be able to replace the damn thing if ever we need to, but in creating that capability, we've added a lot of complications to the design of our bearing, making it that much harder to understand when we look at these engineering drawings, so... oh boy, more goddamned stuff to be dealing with. Gah.

But before we get into all of that, let's stop here and marvel at the overall construction of this thing. Here's the cleaned-up version of M-2 showing us the Upper Bearing, which you just saw in raw form and which is the whole Upper Bearing Assembly, to let you do that now, and just so you know, our main interest for the next little while is going to be the lower left cutaway elevation view (which, alas, is by far the most complicated thing on the drawing), and the upper right Parts Identification List, and you can safely ignore everything else shown in the plan views until further notice.

It's very heavy stuff.

Definitely not the kind of thing you encounter in your day-to-day life elsewhere. Yet another marvel of The Great Rotating Service Structure at Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B, which is a thing so overendowed with marvels as to make your head spin when you start really thinking about it.

I'll point things out individually on M-2, one at a time as we go along, so as you can stop and consider some of this stuff.

We'll start out by very precisely locating exactly where the moving parts of the RSS stop, and the fixed parts start, and this in itself can introduce confusion, so ok, let's define terms a little better before we go any farther.

The ROTATING Service Structure rotates, and the FIXED Service Structure is fixed immobily in place, and all well and good...

Except that's not the case, strictly speaking.

We've already learned that the Hinge Column is Line 1 of the RSS, right? So it's definitely part of the RSS.

But the Hinge Column does not move.

The Hinge Column does not rotate, and is immobily fixed in place, embedded down into the concrete of the Pad Deck as shown on drawing 79K14110 sheet S-7, sitting on top of a quite-large and quite-sturdy steel-reinforced concrete foundation complete with a bunch of heavy piles driven deep into the earth beneath it, which you get to see on drawing 79K10338, sheet S-10.

The Hinge Column is heavy iron. 79K14110 sheet S-6 tells the tale.

The Big Pipe part of the Hinge Column is a weldment, and consists in alternating sections of 42" Ø pipe that that weigh 1,803 pounds per running foot, and 855 pounds per running foot. The heavier parts are found where the Pipe connects to the foundation it sits on, and also in the areas of both Bearings. These are the places where the loading is highest, and the Pipe therefore needs to be strongest.

And as an aside, very early on in my tenure out there on the Pad, one fine day when I was up there with my clipboard and bill of materials rummaging around in the shakeout yard looking for some damn thing or other in the cool of an early Florida morning with the sun slanting very low across the landscape, the Hinge Column pipe segment which carries the Lower Bearing Ball showed up on the back of a common flatbed semi-trailer. And as happens, there occurred a bit of dead time, while Wilhoit's ironworkers were going at it in some way or other, and it was me and the truck driver, just kind of hanging around together for a little while.

Now please keep in mind, that I was only months old at the time, and didn't know diddly shit about nuthin. No fucking appreciation for what I was standing right next to.

And at one point, the truck driver, a guy who worked for an outfit called HULK TRANSFER (it's right there on the bill of materials you saw back on Page 6), who's life work was that of routinely hauling heavy loads of structural steel on standard semi-trailers all over the state of Florida, looked at me with a dumbfounded expression on his face, and with an equally dumbfounded voice tone, told me, "That's the heaviest thing I've ever carried," talking about the section of Hinge Column pipe that Wilhoit was going after at that very moment, and apparently it handled a little different, at speed, rolling down the highway.

And for some reason, that little vignette there in the shakeout yard that morning at Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, burned in, and stuck with me, and here I am right now writing these words, with a set of contract drawings in my possession, so... how much did that thing weigh, anyhow?

S-6 tells us that particular segment of 42" diameter pipe was 29'-8" long and weighed 1,803 pounds per foot.

53,487 pounds.

One single piece of steel.

So... yeah.

And then you stop and think about the kinds of idiots in an overpoweringly self-absorbed hurry, who will pull directly out into oncoming traffic in an overpoweringly self-absorbed effort to get to their ever-so-important destination five or ten seconds earlier...

And every once in a while...

It's gonna be one of these trucks...

and...

How rapidly can a 53,000 pound object traveling down U.S. 1 in rural north Brevard County, at... oh, say... 65 miles per hour, be brought to a near-halt, anyway?

And what happens to anything in front of it, if physics forbids it being brought to a near-halt in time, and instead, it goes right on through them, without them so much as even slowing it down in any significant way?

Well...

Ok, where were we?

Oh yeah, we're sorting out the parts of the Hinge Column that don't move, from the parts that do move.

The only parts of the Hinge Column that do any moving or rotating are the Upper and Lower Bearing HOUSINGS which the RSS Primary Framing at elevations 134'-2" and 208'-2" is welded to, and which firmly hold inside themselves the concave-shaped outer Bearing components, but not the convex-shaped inner bearing components.

The Bearing Housings are attached rigidly to only the outer moving portions of the Bearings. Only the Races. Not the unmoving inner portions. Not the Ball.

And again, for the time being, we're going to try to keep this from becoming overwhelming by focusing our attention strictly on the Upper Hinge Column Bearing only, and leaving the rest of it for later, ok?

We'll be looking at M-2 repeatedly, marked up in different ways, as we pick this thing apart, ok?

The Upper Bearing consists in a pair of Races which are the outer moving parts of our spherical bearing, and which slide in direct lubricated contact with the inner fixed parts (Mind that word fixed, here and throughout this whole narrative, because it will almost always mean UNMOVING and it has nothing to do with something being repaired or not, ok?), transferring the tremendous loads which are impressed by gravity and other forces upon the moving side of the bearing, into and through the fixed side of the bearing, and from there, farther on into whatever's holding it all in place on the fixed, stationary, side of things.

One moving part of the Race, the part on top, has the shape of a cap sitting directly on top of the Ball, with a spherically-concave lower surface, and is an exceedingly-uncommon bespoke design, which resists the 2 million pound downward forces generated by the weight of the RSS, and in our Parts Identification List on M-2 it shows up as Part No. 5 and is called a "Top Thrust Bearing Race."

The other moving part of our Race, down below the "cap", has the shape of a wide horizontal ring, with a spherically-concave inner surface on the sides, which encloses the Ball and resists all sidewise forces which are induced by other factors, including torsion of the RSS as a whole, and wind loads, just to name two of them. On the Parts Identification List on M-2 it shows up as Part No. 7 and is called a "Side Thrust Bearing Race."

This being a spherical bearing, those two Races (top and side) come in direct contact with, and slide across the surface of, a fixed inner Ball, which is also two-part (also top and side), despite the word "Ball" being singular. Exact same type of operation as with any other ball joint. Exact same deal as with how your leg bone connects with your hip bone.

One part of the Ball sits directly on top of the immobile part of the Hinge Column, rigidly attached to it, and it has the shape of a solid dome with a spherically convex upper surface, matching the concave lower surface of the Top Thrust Bearing Race. We find it on our Parts Identification List as Part No. 6 and it's called a "Top Thrust Bearing Ball."

The remainder of the Ball is also attached rigidly and immobily, to the sides of the Hinge Column, immediately below the Top Thrust Bearing Ball, and makes up the sides of the Ball, and thus completes the overall shape of the whole Ball. In similar fashion as the Side Thrust Bearing Race, it also has the shape of wide horizontal ring, with a convex outer surface matching the concave inner surface of the Side Thrust Bearing Race, and we find it on our Parts Identification List as Part No. 8 and it's called the "Side Thrust Bearing Ball."

So with all that introductory background information out of the way, let's go back to 79K14110 sheet M-2 and get a look at all of the parts of this thing which move as the RSS rotates around through 120 degrees of travel. Just the Upper Bearing area stuff that moves, all shaded in undifferentiated blue and green, up there where the RSS Top Truss at elevation 208'-2" connects to the Hinge Column Upper Bearing Housing with its Top and Side Bearing Races firmly attached inside of it. Nothing else.

There is some HEAVY iron in there. Maybe take a look at some of the "Estimated Wgt. Lbs." numbers over there on the far side of the Parts Identification List in the top right corner of M-2.

Ok, now let's do the actual Spherical Bearing itself. Just the part that has two sets of components. A moving outer set and a fixed inner set, which slide against each other in direct lubricated physical contact, transferring some pretty ferocious loads across the spherically-shaped separation-surface between them as they do so.

We'll do the outer set first.

M-2 Top Thrust Bearing Race.

And now M-2 Side Thrust Bearing Race.

And that stuff moves when the RSS moves. That stuff all rotates.

Ok, fine.

Now lets look at the inner parts of the Bearing, just the Bearing itself, nothing else, which do NOT move. This is the stuff that's rigidly attached to the Hinge Column proper. This is the stuff that's rigidly attached to the Big Pipe part of things that extends all the way down into the concrete of Pad Deck, and which holds it all up and (along with Column Line 7) keeps it all from violently collapsing into a gigantic four-million pound pile of twisted wreckage and disarticulated body parts. This is the Ball part of our Spherical Bearing.

So. M-2 Top Thrust Bearing Ball.

And we get to finish it up with M-2 Side Thrust Bearing Ball.

Digging a little deeper, we discover that there is a discrepancy between the material callouts for the Bearing Materials as they are written in John M. Crump's "MECHANICAL FEATURES OF THE SHUTTLE ROTATING SERVICE STRUCTURE" overview document which I first referred you to back on Page 1 and then again on Page 4, and the material callouts for the Bearing Materials as written in the actual 79K05644 Specification, Section 15 AB, Page 4, (and when you get time, scroll through all 19 pages of this Section, 'cause it's very interesting reading, and serves well as an introduction to the contract end of things, and it also has a lot more than just Bearing material callouts to teach you about the Bearings, and yeah, it's a really poor quality copy, but it's readable, just barely, anyway) which you get referred to on the Parts Identification List on Contract Drawing M-2 (we have to use the 79K05644 Pad A spec, because I don't have a copy of the specification for Pad B, but they're identically the same thing in this particular instance).

Going by the Spec (which the contract tells you always has priority in cases of disagreement between spec and drawings, unless specifically instructed otherwise, in writing, by the Contracting Officer, and please keep in mind that John M. Crump's excellent document, despite being very excellent indeed, is neither spec nor drawing, and was never a part of anybody's contract at any time), we see that the Top Thrust Bearing Race, and the Side Thrust Bearing Ball are made out of something with the curious name of "Bearium (B-10)" and of course I couldn't leave a thing like that alone, so down even farther into the rabbit hole we go, and way the hell out there on one of the far side branches, we discover that (note, please, that this is not any kind of "barium" which is Element 56 on the Periodic Table, and barium is a whole separate thing, completely unrelated to "Bearium") Bearium B-10 is an unusual and proprietary alloy of BRONZE, originally made by the... wait for it... Bearium Metal Corporation, and it's a very particular bronze alloy (as with steel alloys, there's a million different alloys of bronze) which contains Copper/Lead/Tin in the proportions of 70, 20, and 10 percent (that's a lot of lead in this stuff, so don't go making any pots and pans or spoons and forks out of it, ok?), and it's used for pretty hard-core applications where heavy shit sitting out in exposed locations has gotta be able to move in a very substantial way every once in a while, and yeah, I'm guessing our four million pound RSS might qualify, eh?

So that's it. That's the innermost guts of the whole thing. This is what lets the RSS rotate, and it's also what everything else shown on M-2 is in service for, in one way or another, directly and indirectly.

And for those of you who are a little more curious about this non-ferrous stuff they're making giant bearings out of, wondering why they're not making 'em completely, one-hundred percent, out of the steel that everything else out here seems to be made of, or maybe wondering what's up with all that lead in there, well here you go with a little something by W. A. Glaeser, who wrote it for the Journal of Metals, with the exciting title of Wear Properties of Heavy Loaded Copper-Base Bearing Alloys, and he talks about "Leaded Tin Bronzes" (such as our Bearium B-10) on Page 2. Don't let my snarky tone fool you, 'cause if they get it wrong, and things don't behave as expected, and it's you that's driving across the Big Bridge that day... well... whoever it is that's over there on the other side... waiting for you... might not get to see you... Ever. So it's all fun and games and everybody gets a good laugh at some of the more wonkish aspects this stuff... ...until there's blood-smeared body parts sticking out of the rubble, and the guys who design, fabricate, and build this stuff are playing for KEEPS, but it's your ass, and not theirs, that winds up being on the line when shit gets real.

Bronze and big bearings go together like fish and water. You're not going to always see fish in water, and you're not going to always see water surrounding fish, but in general... yeah. Big bearings and bronze. Bronze is not as strong (nor is it as cheap), generally speaking, as steel, but it has a certain forgiveness which steel lacks, and if steel-on-steel cannot be persuaded to do it... Bronze-on-steel is a bit more accommodating and will happily keep right on sliding under heavy load without complaint, long after steel-on-steel has gone too far, galled up, and ground itself to bits because of accumulating friction and adhesion. Take your big bearing and make one half of it out of nice strong steel, and the other half of it out of nice forgiving bronze, and you'll be doing yourself a big favor whenever you need a little something extra, almost every single time. Yes, there's exceptions. We know that. But bronze is still our go-to material for big bearings. Except of course, for the exceptions. And we will be meeting a couple of those exceptions here in the coming pages, which will be steel-on-steel, without a lick of bronze to be found anywhere, in another set of Spherical Bearings which we will be meeting soon enough, but not now, ok?

So now let's remove as much extraneous information from our drawing as we can, and while we're doing that, we'll also bring all the rest of the fixed side of things into focus too, which will be the shaft of our Hinge Column proper, the Big Pipe, along with the FSS Struts that attach to it, along with the Jacking Lugs and the Bearing Changeout Lugs, too.

And we just stop here and give what is now a greatly-altered M-2 a look, making sure we can visualize how the rotating dark blue structure along with the light green access platform stuff, sits down on top of all that fixed-in-place light blue, and I'll leave the Bearing alone, with it's own color-coding. More details coming. Lot's more. But for now, just kind of take this one in through the pores of your skin and don't worry to much about it as you admire the pretty colors and the interestingly-artistic shapes containing them. I've cleaned it up a lot, but it's not perfectly cleaned up, and there's still a few extraneous lines in there, but in the main, this should be plenty good enough to use.

Feel free to go back to any or all of the previous incarnations of M-2 that I've provided links to, up above, open 'em up in your browser, and compare 'em to this latest version. In fact, I recommend it. Open 'em up in separate browser tabs and blink back and forth between them. Really helps with properly identifying things. And just for fun, with my latest doctored-up version, try and find where I eliminated a mistake with the Connection Sleeve for the FSS Strut(s) that crept into the Pad B version of this drawing (the one we're using), compared with the Pad A version, 79K04400 sheet M-117 (and there's other differences in there too, and I'll leave it up to you to play a game of "Spot the Difference" on your own time in your own way), where the diameter of the FSS Strut on the Pad B drawing wound up being depicted smaller than it was on the Pad A drawing, and hoo boy, you cannot imagine how much trouble a tiny detail like that can really cause.

Ok. We've about beat this one to death, but we're still not quite finished with the Upper Bearing.

Although it was never actually done during the entire lifetime of the Pad, we need to get a look at how they would have jacked up the RSS and replaced the Bearings.

And it's back to an even more altered version of 79K14110 drawing M-2 we go, once again, for a simplified Bearing removal procedure that doesn't include every single step, and doesn't include every single piece of hardware, but it should be more than adequate for getting an overall sense of things.

Some of you should still be having questions about various items, like maybe how all that "Shear Key", "Backing Ring" (hint: it's what holds the whole goddamned thing up in the air), and other miscellaneous hardware fits in to the overall picture and actually works, so here's a copy of 79K14110 M-6, bare, to let you see that end of things.

This stuff is all pretty straightforward, and I'm not going to go messing around with that drawing, but it's worth noting that this whole system is pretty damn clever, and of course it worked perfectly in the real world. I was never around for any of this stuff when it was being fabricated, but I wish I was, because there's a lot of really close-tolerance work here, which was done on some exceptionally-heavy steel, and I can only imagine some of the really cool stuff those people came up with, down on the the shop floor, in Sheffield Steel's fabrication shop in Palatka, to make it all work, per the spec, to the tolerances. It's really amazing stuff, when you think about it.

And some of you might be wondering about the Bearing, and maybe what the hell was holding the Lower Ball in place, wrapped around the top end of the Hinge Column the way it was, as an unbroken one-piece bronze casting, so here's 79K14110 drawing M-4 to let you see how that stuff all worked. Again, really close-tolerance stuff. Pretty radical, if you ask me. And there's an email link down at the bottom of the page, too. Ask me, if you find that you're still scratching your head over this thing. But you gotta put in your own work, first, and yeah, I'll check to see if you did. But maybe I'll be able to help if it continues to refuse to make any sense at all, no matter how many times you've looked at it. It could happen.

And that's how that gets done.

Except of course, they never had to do it, so it never got done, even once.

Tra la la.

And now it's time to leave the Upper Hinge Column Bearing in peace and head elsewhere, but before we go...

...one last little story about it.

Go back to the original version of M-2 and give the Parts Identification List another look, and give Part No. 10 your attention for a moment. "Locking Bolt W/Turning Rods." And the list goes on to tell us there's 3 of 'em, and each one of 'em weighs a substantial-enough 192 pounds, each.

All well and good. So what?

Well...

They're calling 'em "Locking Bolts" but really, that's not what they are at all. Well, they are, but you don't know about this kind of stuff by that name. You know it by the name of "Set Screws."

The things you turn with a small hex-key allen wrench or a little screwdriver, to run them down into place to secure the knob you just put back on the shaft where you turn the volume up or down on your sound system, or maybe one of the knobs on an old stove, or any of a million other similar things with knobs on 'em that you turn, and a million other kinds of things, too.

So, it turns out that the Hinge Column on the RSS has SET SCREWS!

But they're fucking GIANT!

And it fell to me, one fine day, for reasons I no longer remember, to have to schlep one of these things up to the Pad Deck from the Sheffield Steel field trailer, and hand it over to the ironworkers.

And it was one of the weirdest things I've ever done in my life.

As the Parts Identification List tells us, it was half a foot in diameter, and two feet long. 192 pounds. Light gray galvanized finish. It had acme screw threads, and it had a bit of a blunted end where it was supposed to push against the unmoving shaft of the Hinge Column when in use (which turned out to be never, as we have already learned), and on the other end it had a hole drilled through it, with a loose-fitting rod going through that hole which would clank around if you let it, maybe ¾" diameter and about a foot and a half long with balls welded on either end to trap it inside of the hole it went through on the screw, to keep it from ever falling out (and to also pinch the holy living fuck out of your finger or thumb it you foolishly placed it next to the hole while you were wrestling with the damn thing, and the rod decided to suddenly clank across to the other side while you were doing so, and oh yeah, don't drop that motherfucker or otherwise it's bye-bye foot, steel-toed boots bedamned and...), and in every imaginable respect, this thing looked identical to a common set screw that you'd find hidden around on the back side of some knob in your house somewhere.

Except it was GIANT, and I could hardly pick the goddamned thing up, and the sensation was strongly as if being in a particularly-vivid dream, with the sharpest and most accurate imaginable detail, except for one thing, which was...

...very very wrong...

...and the memory, instantaneously, was burned in deeply...

...and in some mysterious way, my mind was irrevocably altered that day, and has never been exactly the same, since. To learn that a thing as staggeringly large as the Rotating Service Structure would have set screws!

To learn a thing like that by having to pick one of the sonofabitches up, in person, and carry its back-wrenching weight (it was awkward to handle, just a little too wide to properly grasp, and it wanted very much to roll off of the ends of my fingers or the sides of my hands) over to my car and drive it up on top of the Pad.

I dunno. Maybe you had to be there that day or something.

Here's an image that shows 'em to you, complete with some labels I've put on it, extracted from John A. O'Connor's astounding set of gigapans taken at Pad A shortly following The End of the Program (thanks John!) which you can find hosted at Nasatech.net and here's a link to the gigapan I took my image from, and I highly recommend you click on this link to http://nasatech.net/ntSubPad39A/Pad39A195LvlRSSHinge131024/ and look at it, and then look at all the rest of 'em, too.

Alright already! Enough already! Enough with the goddamned Upper Hinge Column Bearing already!

Ok, fine.

Let's go look at the Lower Hinge Column Bearing, then.

Gah!

And right away, when you look at it on 79K14110 sheet M-3, you can see that it's... different.

The Bearing itself is different, and the stuff around it is different, too.

Different structural steel, different access platformS, different changeout-jacking components, lotta different stuff.

The main difference, is that there's nothing there that's specific-designed for significant axial loads. Nothing there for the kinds of thrust loads which run longways down the axis of rotation like we see with the Upper Bearing.

Which should make you stop, when you realize that the whole thing, every last bit of the weight, one full half of the whole RSS, is being borne by that single Top Bearing Race and Top Bearing Ball pair, up there sitting down on the very top of the Hinge Column as the top part of the Upper Bearing.

Yes, this Lower Bearing is also a Thrust Bearing, and it's spherical, but it sees none of the axial loads which the Upper Bearing sees as a result of carrying the weight of the RSS. The Lower Bearing is for horizontal and/or torsional forces (quite significant, to be sure) and for those reasons, it does not need anything that would correspond to that Top Race and Top Ball that the Upper Bearing has, and so it's simply not there.

Another significant difference is that, since we're somewhere in the middle of things along the length of the Big Unmovable Pipe which is our Hinge Column, we're not going to be able to simply "unscrew the cap," reach down in there through an opening on top, and lift anything out, to replace it and/or reinstall it. So right away, the Bearing Ball and the Bearing Race, both have to be segmented, to allow the segments to be pulled loose sideways from the Big Pipe and dealt with elsewhere following their removal. They're no longer single ring-shaped castings, and instead they're now ring segment castings, three each, for Ball and Race, and that alters a lot of stuff, all by itself, right there.

Another issue with being in the middle of the Big Pipe is than not only can things not be gotten to easily or effectively by lifting them upward, they now have to be gotten to by lowering them downward, which promptly dictates a second Access Platform, farther down below, where things will wind up once they're fully lowered, all nice and ready to be taken apart.

Which leads directly to completely different gear for making all aspects of this stuff happen, although the Centering Changeout Jacks and Locking Bolts remain pretty much exactly the same. But everything else... new and different stuff compared to what we just learned about with the Upper Bearing with its workpoint in line with the Top Truss up there at elevation 208'-2".

And we've learned a lot with the Upper Bearing, so I'm going to presume you're reasonably checked-out on a lot this stuff, and instead of chopping up M-3 a hundred different ways, I'm going to just go ahead and color code it in very similar fashion to the way I color coded M-2. But first I'm gonna give you a basic sense of the Bearing Removal Procedure in simplified form, and then after that you'll get to look at that color-coded version of M-3, and kind of walk yourself through it that way, ok?

Get the Lowering/Lifting Jacks in place, bottom end on the Hinge Column Lugs, and top end on the Retainer Ring Segment Lugs.

Give it a good centering squeeze with the Bearing Changeout Jacks.

Lock it down with the Locking Bolts and let off with the Changeout Jacks.

Remove the bolts on the underside of the Retainer Ring Segments that fasten them to the bottom edge of the Bearing Housing.

Pull it all down, Retainer Ring, Race, and Ball, using the Lifting/Lowering Jacks.

Put the temporary Bearing Installation/Changeout Fixtures (Part No. 34 on our Parts Identification List) in place, to keep the Ball Segments from falling on us and killing us as we continue the work.

Install the Lifting Eyebolts on the Race Segments, and hook on to 'em with the Removal Gear that's not shown anywhere on the drawing.

Remove the bolts (hidden down there inside their little recesses on the underside of the Retainer Ring Segments) that attach the Race Segments to the Retainer Ring Segments.

Use the Removal Gear attached to the Eyebolts to pluck the Race Segments off of the Hinge Column and go put 'em somewhere.

Install the Lifting Eyebolts on the Ball Segments, and hook on to 'em with the Removal Gear that's not shown anywhere on the drawing.

Remove the temporary Bearing Installation/Changeout Fixtures (Part No. 34) to allow for removal of the Ball Segments.

Use the Removal Gear attached to the Eyebolts to pluck the Ball Segments off of the Hinge Column and go put 'em somewhere.

And that's it, you're done.

And now here's drawing 79K14110 sheet M-3 all nice and color-coded for you, to help you visualize all this stuff a little better.

And we'll toss in 79K14110 sheet M-5, plain, to give you a little better look at some more of it, too.

And you may now consider yourself fully checked-out on RSS Hinge Column Bearing changeout procedures from this point onward, ok?

And a respectable amount of other stuff, too.

You did good.

Put this thing away.

Go take a break, ok?

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