The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 13: Skip Box.
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Still Life with Skipbox and Stretcher Basket.
And it almost has a renaissance look about it. Somebody like Rembrandt or perhaps da Vinci could have produced quite the fascinating piece of work from this setting.
Darkly massive, pressing down on everything around it with a gloomy, near-Gothic ambiance, the West Side Flame Deflector dominates the left side of the image with its mysterious triangular mana, and in the distance its mirror-image twin bides its own time in its own place.
Across the frame from there, things lighten up into a snarl of angular steel elements beneath an incongruous sky of clearest blue, giving little away as to their true identity, true purpose, true nature.
In the foreground, center, the skipbox waits for its next occupants, waits to have its lifting sling which hangs in twisted disarray without bearing any weight in tension, to be placed once again onto the crane hook, waits to levitate its burden like a magic-carpet, taking them up through the air to some place that only eagles might be expected to gain fair access to, and to its right, strapped against a run of removable handrail which warns of a hidden five-story vertical fall immediately beyond it, a further warning in the form of a stretcher basket giving mute testimony to the unseen dangers, unseen things that will injure, and that will kill, in the blink of an eye, filling the air all around like evil spirits. Invisible. Patient. Waiting.
Welcome to yet another facet of my world.
We are back up on the pad deck, once again.
The SFD's were just one element of the overall Flame Deflector System, and needed to be added to the Pad because the footprint of the two Solid Rocket Boosters on either side of the External Tank was a bit wide for the existing Flame Trench (originally designed and built for the somewhat-narrower exhaust footprint of a Saturn V), thus necessitating measures be taken to prevent their exhaust plumes from impinging directly upon the surface of the Pad Deck beyond the margins of the Flame Trench, which is an area that was never designed to take that kind of a beating, and also to prevent that impinging exhaust plume from splashing off to the side, damaging or destroying other things up on the Pad Deck in that area.
The SFD's needed to be mobile, to avoid interfering with the Crawler when it brings the MLP out to the Pad, (as can be seen in this schematicized layout elevation view with the SFD's added in), and ran, no different than a steam locomotive might run, along steel rails which allow them to be moved from their Park Position out of the way at the north end of the Pad when not in use, to their Launch Position beneath the MLP, where they will be doing their job on launch day, and they get locked down in either place.
And, again, like a steam locomotive (but moreso, actually), the SFD's were heavy, and if you look into the gloom at the triangular shapes of the steel framing in there, and consider that it's all very-solid steel, you might be able to gain some small understanding of just how heavy the SFD's really were, and once that understanding sets in, you start to think about why?
Why so heavy?
And then maybe that which comes out of the bottoms of the Space Shuttle's Solid Rocket Boosters begins to gain your attention in a new way. And it was only a small glancing part of that, which the SFD's were built to deflect, to try in some small way to manage, to keep it back in the Trench. And then you can see things start to take on their true characteristics, their true form, and the energy release of a thing that might demand iron this heavy to deflect it... not stop it, no. Just deflect it some... and the scale of that energy release becomes a little more understandable and perhaps a little more frightening too.
The exhaust plume from the SRB's is enough to make a volcano blush. 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, traveling at Mach 2.
Serious business.
Which the deflectors are built to deal with.
On launch day, the Side Flame Deflectors are both rolled to the south, to the position where you see the nearest one, the West SFD, hard against the position of the crest of SSW Spray Headers which line the apex of the central element of the system, which was always simply called the "Flame Deflector," which divides the Flame Trench into two halves, north and south.
When not in the launch position, the SFD's are almost always to be found rolled back to the far north end of their rails, where you see the East SFD, partially hidden behind the West one.
Why the West SFD is where it is in this image, I cannot say. Something dictated it be moved and so it was. Were they testing it in its locked position for launch? Were they fit-checking it with some of the SSW stuff? Was it just in the way of something else being done over on the north edge of the Pad? I do not know.
But whatever the reasons, this image gives a decent look at the fact that the deflectors, as was so very much else on the launch pad, were mobile.
Across the Trench, you can see:
The North Piping Bridge.
The SSW Spray Header for the East Wall of the Flame Trench.
SSW Supply Risers for the MLP.
Pneumatics Tower.
SSW Water Tower.
MLP Mount Pedestals.
And behind it all, the placid blue of the Atlantic Ocean.
On the near side of the Trench, steel elements which have yet to be lifted into place sit on cribbing, waiting their turn to have choker slings wrapped around them and then get pulled into the sky somewhere. A pre-assembled section of handrail pipes for a platform somewhere far above you, complete with toeplate. A fairly-heavy post with a substantial piece of channel-iron at its far end, and stiffener plates at its near, open, end, looking for all the world like stubby fins on the bottom of a rocket. Loose channel-iron with clip-angles, and a wide-flange beam without.
A pickboard lays, partially-shadowed by the gigantic steel tower which looms invisibly out of frame, over your left shoulder.
And the skipbox.
Ratty, ragged, looking like it had been slapped together by drunken rednecks out at a backwoods moonshine still, into which you will willingly place yourself, trusting your very life to it, trusting your very life to this ratty ramshackle thing, as it flies you into the air a hundred feet or more, to the accompaniment of diesel growls from a large construction crane, to some place that cannot be gotten to, otherwise... unless you are an ironworker.
Which you are not.
Things you never forget in your life...
And I'm brand-new here and I'm only an answering machine...
But my boss...
My boss, Richard Walls, has seen something in me, and has acted upon it.
And it was that unseen, unsuspected, thing in me that had the two of us up on the pad deck, almost exactly where this image is showing.
And I'm oh so very very new at all this.
And oh so very unsure of myself.
And I'm surrounded with the Acme of Existence, an Apollo Program Saturn V Launch Pad covered with all the Acme of Existence people who were rebuilding it into a Space Shuttle Launch Pad, and you don't just go grab people off the street for this kind of work, and these are real people, and what the hell am I doing up here with these guys?
And if you look at the skipbox in this image, you can see that it's completely home-made.
Its body is made from steel rod, four pieces, very likely repurposed rebar, maybe three-eights, maybe one-half inch diameter, but whatever it is, it's quite light. At the top, the rods come together and are welded to a plate of equally light steel which has been torch-cut to shape, complete with a hole near its top margin into which a large galvanized shackle (which is by far the strongest part of the whole thing) has been inserted, onto which a length (not a whole lot, and certainly not heavy) of wire rope has been fitted by means of the swedged loops on either end of it, and this is it, sum and total, the entirety of the lifting end of things.
At the other end of things, the end that your boots will be resting upon, the end that holds you up and keeps you from falling to your death while you're in the air with this thing, a piece of common plywood rests with its perimeter edges supported by the inside flanges of some, once again, light angle-iron. I'll guess 2 x 2 x ⅛" but I could be off a little, either way, but regardless of the accuracy of my eyeballing of things, there can be no questioning that it's light, and I'll further surmise that the plywood does not appear to be actually fastened in there anywhere, and instead, is simply using the closeness of its exterior perimeter dimensions matching with the interior perimeter dimensions of the upstanding legs of that angle-iron it's resting in to sort of just snug-fit it in there tightly enough to preclude worry (by those who make and use this kind of stuff as part of their day-to-day livelihood, and who therefore actually know how this all works) of it ever coming out of there somehow and releasing its burden (that's you, by the way) to plummet to the ground from somewhere unpleasantly-high above. Beneath the plywood, we will continue to surmise that there's a couple of cross-pieces of more of that repurposed re-bar, running diagonally from corner to corner both ways under there, or maybe side to side, I really don't know, and I never actually looked closely at the underside of the thing when it was in the air over my head with somebody else in it, so those details shall have to forever remain unknown.
That plywood looks for all the world to be the exact same material and cut as the plywood you'll see on a float, about which much more, later, but the sense of things is that to an untrained eye, the skipbox is in no way sturdy enough to do what it's asked to do on a regular and routine basis.
In the middle of things, there are two sets of perimeter bars, one at a lower, intermediate, level that goes all the way around and is made from three separate pieces (one of which has taken a pretty good hit somewhere along the line) of rod that span the open distances between the vertical rods that make up the cage of the thing everywhere except for the side that you enter the box from, where the intermediate perimeter piece is made of our light angle iron, to stiffen things up on that side, there being no corresponding stiffener (or anything else, either) up above it, and at the upper level, located somewhere around the level of your own waist or hips, depending on how tall you are, three more pieces of the same light angle-iron that makes up the bottom frame, which only goes three-quarters around the cage, and on the side which faces directly towards the darkness of the West SFD, there is no solid material of any kind, and instead you can see a bit of chain (again, light) hanging down on the left side of the thing, and now Dick Walls is telling me to step over that lower bar, and fasten the chain behind me, and Red Milliken is in the skipbox with us, and the crane growls...
And it was the most delicious, scary, fun, sensation you could ever possibly imagine...
And we flew through the air!
Like goddamned eagles or something!
And oh god, the concrete... the concrete of the pad deck. Oh god, it's too far. It's too far down there! But I'm literally rubbing shoulders with high-end people in this ramshackle redneck cage which barely has enough room to hold the three of us, and I cannot show fear.
I. Can. Not.
And of course I'm sure Dick and Red could both smell the stench of it all over me.
They both knew that this was the first time I'd ever been in such a thing.
Ever flown through the air in a skipbox.
And after zooming into the air at an alarmingly high rate of speed, we wound up at the edge of the framing at the 135' level of the RSS, eighty feet up, and the crane operator brought the skipbox to an amazingly-gentle stop, not on, but leaning against the side, of the floor steel up there, and with my eyes bulging out of their sockets as I contemplated the distant concrete beneath us, feeling the skip box reposition itself as I moved, I unfastened the chain and stepped out, over the intervening perimeter steel member of the skipbox which was located somewhere near my knees, through the now-open area where the chain had been, absolutely terrified of tripping over that knee-level perimeter steel member, and somehow wound up with the soles of my boots solidly down upon the smooth painted deckplate covering the floor steel of The Great RSS of Pad B, solidly planted but still terrified of the horrible Gulf of Death around which there was no handrail and which was located inches behind me as I continued farther across the smooth deckplates to hopefully safer ground somewhere else, far away from that edge, that terrifying, naked, unguarded, wide-open... ...edge.
And the tape recording stops right there, and there were held sheets of paper, maybe in a tablet or maybe on a clipboard, and pencils and tape measures, and instructions from Dick Walls (who was still, along with Red, keeping a close eye on me, but not overtly so), and all of it was toned down low in the afternoon shadows which consumed that whole side of the RSS in general that day, and the noticeably-darker interior space of the PCR Cavity within it in particular, and the expansive deckplate that lines the floor of the PCR is level and smooth instead of the sort of knobby checkerplate you encounter almost everywhere else there's any deckplate instead of vastly more common steel-bar grating, and it's painted gray, and it has a nice look about it somehow, and it feels rock-solid under the soles of my boots... but that's the end of the tape right there, and if my life depended on it, I could not possibly tell you why we were up there, or what we subsequently did...
But that first ride...
Things you never forget in your life...
Flying like an eagle over a Moon Rocket Launch Pad...
And from then on, I was madly in love with the skipbox. Madly in love with flying like an eagle over a Moon Rocket Launch Pad.
And I always looked forward to every opportunity to get into the thing and go for a ride.
Which, as time went on and my legs for high steel got better, became less and less until it quit happening altogether...
...and that was good...
...but it was also bad.
I still miss flying in the skipbox to this day.
But the stretcher basket remained tied to the removable handrail that guarded the precipice of the Flame Trench Wall.
And it never said a word.
It didn't have to.
It was more than enough just to know it was there.
It was there for a reason.
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