The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 10: RCS Room Panorama.
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Mid-afternoon.
We're looking south from the FSS in similar fashion as we were in the previous photograph, but we've come down one level, and are now standing with our boots on top of the steel-bar grating at elevation 240' on the FSS, looking across as a six-foot one-inch tall photographer with our camera at eye-level, just slightly above the roof level of the RCS Room, which slopes ever-so-slightly down from 241'-10⅝" along it's front edge (facing the crawlerway in this photograph) to 241'-7⅛" along its back edge (facing the Hoist Equipment Room in this photograph), and yes, they really were constructing a thirteen-story high-rise hotel that rolled back and forth across the countryside to one eighth inch tolerances, and they really were getting those tolerances whenever they needed them, and the accuracy of some of what was going on with astoundingly large and heavy objects out here defies belief, but let us not get into that aspect of things just this right-now, shall we?
Back in the early 1980's, digital cameras had yet to enter common usage, and it was all done with film, and if you wanted to combine images you had to physically take the photographic prints and arrange them, one on top of the other, which is what you're seeing here.
The join between images could never be a perfect one, and that sort of disparity is plainly-visible here, too.
We will be seeing many more of these "paste-up panoramas" as we continue with our story.
Here's our image again, with some of the more salient features labeled.
Off in the far distance at left, the SMAB and VIB can be seen, no more than smudges against the horizon, on Air Force property at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, which abuts, but is completely different and distinct from, NASA property on the Kennedy Space Center.
These two quite-large buildings were part of the military's Titan III Integrate-Transfer-Launch area, and although I did not know it when I took this photograph, after we were done with this portion of the construction of Pad B, I would find myself working out of the same Sheffield Steel field trailer, which had been moved to a location near the main roadway at the ITL, across from the VIB, working a job that involved the construction of a pair of Payload Integration Cells in the SMAB, for a facility which would go by the name of SPIF, which stood for Shuttle Payload Integration Facility, and yes, some of the acronyms they used out on the Cape were more than just a little outré.
To the right of the SMAB and VIB, extending from out of frame bottom left, off into the distance where it abruptly seems to just "stop" but in fact takes a very gentle left turn, the Crawlerway which was originally designed and built for Saturn V, Apollo Program, purposes, can be seen.
You cannot see it in this photograph, but beyond the gentle turn, the Crawlerway extends southwards until it meets its other branch, which leads eastwards toward Pad A, and from there turns and continues westward toward the VAB, which is where the Saturn V Moonrockets were assembled. The "gentle turn" is a result of the original (but very preliminary) Apollo Program plans which included building more launch pads for more Saturn V launch vehicles, and where the bend can be seen in this photograph, the original intention was to run another branch of the Crawlerway farther north to where it would reach never-built Pad C and possibly even D, and had the "Nova" project ever been undertaken, a fair bit more of the alphabet would have been used-up too, but the funding never came and it was not to be, and it never got past the preliminary paperwork that it was being designed on, leaving only this curious turn in the Crawlerway as a reminder of what might have been.
And whether or not it might have been a good idea to press further with Apollo and Nova, it was definitely a good idea that they bought up all the land when they were thinking they might be going to need it. The Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge is the result, and considering what the developers have done to all the rest of Florida's once-pristine coastline in the intervening decades since the land was acquired, it's a lucky thing they got it when they did. I personally know more people than I'd care to admit (one is too many, but you get the idea), who would destroy every last bit of it to line their own pockets. So. Sometimes the Law of Unintended Consequences works for you, and not against you.
Dominating the center of the image, the structural steel framework if the RCS Room crowds in on itself, dark, impenetrable, inscrutable.
On its left margin, partially obscured, the crane which is lifting the iron it's being constructed from stands tall, load line descending to an unknowable place deep within the impenetrable thicket of dark steel.
To the right of the RCS Room, the Hoist Equipment Room gleams white with it's newly-installed skin of insulated-metal paneling, with a run of cable tray supports taking a turn in their pathway across its roof.
Distant, down and to the right, contractor field trailers crowd around dirt roads and ditches in a weedy backwater area of the pad.
In the temporary work area between the RCS Room and the Hoist Equipment Room, union ironworkers ply their craft, including one of which, if you zoom way in and look close, is bent over in a kneeling position, almost obscured by the near corner of the Hoist Equipment Room, but not quite, with his head directly behind the center of the large stand-up fan used for cooling people and work areas as well as blowing welding fumes away, with an arc struck on the welding he's doing, plainly-visible just to the left of the fan post, immediately below its blades.
When you see that piercingly-brilliant blue-white flare of light, even when it's way over on the edge of your vision off to the side, you'd better be putting a hand up to block that light from reaching any part of your eye, turning around sufficiently to move it completely out of the field of your vision, or moving to some place where an intervening object blocks the light, or you're going to be getting a case of welding flash-burn, which sneaks up on you very sly and innocuously without you realizing it, and can then become very irritating and/or painful, and can also cause permanent damage to your eyes, so you always need to be mindful of it.
And if you look at the closely-spaced steel of the RCS Room, you might notice that it's not only closely-spaced, but that it's also surprisingly heavy for what amounts to being a simple thirty-foot-tall box.
Why?
And the answer comes as a doublet, one half of which we've already talked about a little bit, and both halves of which have to do with one of the main tasks which the RCS Room must perform, and the task in question consists in providing support for the 90-Ton Payload Canister Hoist lifting and load blocks, as well as the boom pendants which hold the Canister rigidly in place once it's been lifted into place and unhooked from the Hoist.
90 tons, plus such safety margin as is deemed necessary, dictates respectable-enough steel, but there's a little bit more to it than that, so here comes the second half of our doublet.
In addition to simply holding the Canister and the payload it carries, up, the supporting steel in the RCS Room must hold things in place very rigidly.
The tolerances for deflection, for motion of any kind, of that suspended Canister and payload, as it is supported by the steel in the RCS Room, with respect to the precise location and orientation of the rest of the RSS/PCR system, are tight.
Payloads routinely cost into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and are extraordinarily high precision instruments, being built to extraordinarily close tolerances, and this whole apparatus is over one hundred and fifty feet up in the air, just hanging there, and when we're working with the Canister we do not want things to be moving around or deflecting in any way, to any amount. When the PGHM plucks a heavy item out of the Canister. When a thunderstorm rolls in from the west and the wind starts blowing. When somebody places a substantial load into the PCR Elevator and takes it up to Level 5. When somebody walks out on the catwalks to either side of the RCS Room, to do some work on one of the SRB's. Or... anything at all. We want rigid. We additionally do not want the RSS/RCS Room system to go anywhere. To bend. To subtly (or not so subtly) relocate itself over time. We do not want things hanging from our structure to be jostling into or banging up against Space Shuttley Things that are firmly planted on top of the MLP and which are nowhere actually touching the things that are hanging from our structure until we very carefully put them in some predesignated exact spot and nowhere else, and we'd best not mess this one up, so yeah, we're gonna make damn good and sure that the part of things which some of our insanely-expensive and delicate stuff is just sort of dangling from... is STURDY.
And so they do.
And so the RCS Room is sturdy.
And perhaps in leaving, I will take the time to revisit the Sheffield Steel field trailer while we're still up here, which is showing fairly well down in the far lower-right corner of things, and I've cropped in on it and labeled it, here.
Look close, and you can see the top half of the sliding-glass door that gave entrance to the trailer, as a dark rectangle to the right of center, peeking above the roof of the Wilhoit trailer which is next door to it, just east of it, closer to the pad.
Now imagine yourself sitting in a chair at a desk, with a clear line of vision through that sliding-glass doorway above Wilhoit's trailer, to the place where this photograph was taken, waiting to answer a phone that would never ring, sitting there experiencing an impossible mixture of excruciating boredom and wide-eyed wonder, and as the clock ticked along with dreadful slowness, doodling with pencil on loose paper, a simulacrum of that which you see through the glass.
It's all too uncanny.
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