The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 17: Wilhoit's Falsework From Underneath.
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Wilhoit's Falsework.
Viewed, unfortunately, using a photograph that breaks all the rules of lighting for photography and then stomps them into the ground, just to be sure. And looks it. But sometimes, impossible subject matter demands impossible photographs, and if we want any kind of record of things, well then, we're just going to have to take the photograph and learn how to live with it, as-is. Shooting directly into the source of the light, with a brilliantly-lit sky as background, trying to show the exceedingly-dark shadowed sides of complex objects silhouetted against that brilliance, lurking half-seen in the dim gloom beneath a vast sky-blocking object looming directly overhead just out of view ... well... best of luck with that one.
And don't forget that we're working from an original source which is an ancient small-format print photograph, four decades old, with all the jolly fun that accumulates silently on such photographic prints over such periods of time.
The miracle is that we're seeing anything here at all.
I've worked this image pretty hard, post-processing it digitally, and I'm guessing we're getting just about as much as it's ever going to have to give.
But of course me being me, I've hit it again with an eye toward bringing up the faint details in the darkest areas, just so you can get a better idea of what it is that's really here, and here's that re-hit image, monochrome.
This will be the best close-up of the falsework that they built the RSS on top of, that we're going to be getting in this series of images and stories.
Look down and to the right near ground level, where a pair of pipe diagonals meet one of the vertical members, and between the pipe diagonals you will see the shadowed silhouette of an ironworker's torso and head, viewed at an angle from behind. Kinda helps give a sense of scale to things.
I've already discussed my opinions about what I believe to be the story behind this stuff, and in this frame, you can get a better idea of the nature of all that dual-member, crosshatched with x-bracing stuff I was going on about earlier, and in the monochrome enhancement you can see a lot more detail in some of the horizontal and vertical members of the falsework, in particular the largest darkest one running side-to-side roughly two-thirds up from the bottom of the frame.
The main columns of the falsework have substantial square reinforced-concrete footers which were poured on top of the Pad Deck concrete, but which are not properly attached to it, and instead are simply resting on top of it, and those were removed along with everything else when it came time to remove the falsework and allow the RSS to stand on its own, fully self-supporting.
Wilhoit erected the RSS on A Pad too, prior to B Pad, using an Apollo-era Mobile Launcher as a sort of ready-made falsework, which perforce located the growing RSS in the MATE position, spanning the flame trench, sitting on top of the "box" part of the Mobile Launcher with the LUT rising into the sky directly in front of it.
And I would imagine that may not have worked as well as they might have wanted it to, because when it came time to do B Pad, they scrapped that whole idea, told NASA, "You can keep your Mobile Launcher thank you very much, we won't be needing it," and went straight-up from the pad deck with the falsework over at B Pad on the second go-round, building the RSS in the RETRACTED position.
I was not around for any of the Pad A work, so I have no background whatsoever on that end of things, above and beyond such fragments of information as I could glean from my boss, Dick Walls, the Wilhoit crew, RS&H Engineering people, and some of the NASA types, all of who were part of that work and knew all about it.
It must have looked like a good idea on paper, but I can see where trying to put something as complex and gigantic as a Rotating Service Structure together, while it was sitting over a giant steel box, that itself was sitting over a gigantic gash in the ground, could cause more than just a few problems with gaining straightforward access to things.
So they abandoned that idea when they moved over to B Pad, and went at it over nice firm flat easy-to-move-around-on-and-get-to-things, solid concrete that you could drive a crane right up next to what you were working on, or even underneath it, and otherwise not have to hassle with going around ridiculous gigantic steel boxes that were 160 feet by 135 feet in overall size, with a steel deck that was 45 feet above the surface of the pad, that were built like a cross between a submarine and a bomb shelter, and also not have to hassle with going the long way around a ridiculous gigantic five-story-deep hole in the ground all the time, too.
You look at the material the falsework was made out of closely, and you start wondering about the particulars of it, and the exact, precise, structural characteristics of it, and you know that Cecil Wilhoit knew what it was good for structurally, what kind of load it would carry, without even having to think about it, because he was as hands-on with this kind of stuff as they get...
But what about the guys over on the NASA side of the house?
What about all those young rosy-cheeked engineers fresh out of college who got tasked with running the calcs on this stuff?
"You're going to be using, what?"
"And you know it's capable of carrying the load you intend to carry on it, how?"
And the NASA managers are breathing down these poor schlub's necks, demanding complete understanding and assurance, technically, that it will hold up the whole RSS...
"...'cause ya know, we'd kind of like to make sure the damn thing doesn't collapse, killing everybody on it and under it, and disrupting the whole Space Shuttle Program in the process..."
"...so maybe try to see it from our point of view if you can, and maybe try to understand that we need to know, in the most rigorous and technical manner possible..."
And Cecil's probably already underway with it, and one of the things I gleaned from the people who worked with him, is that Cecil Wilhoit (and Red Milliken, who I did know and work with, too) were not the kind of people who would dawdle around once they had their teeth sunk into something, and I distinctly remember one of the engineers who worked the erection of the FSS on B Pad, which was also done by Wilhoit, telling me that they'd be in a meeting discussing the particulars of picking up the next two-level segment of the old LUT which the FSS was assembled from, and as somebody or other would drone on about this, or that, or some damn thing, deciding whether or not they should even allow it in the first place, and what the procedure would be, and what the allowable loads would be on any given aspect of the lift, and how they might be given verifiable assurance that Wilhoit would be following the NASA-approved procedure, and they'd be looking out the window of the field trailer watching Wilhoit's cranes in the process of lifting and setting the very segment they were talking about, and I'm pretty sure when it was time to get moving on the falsework, things were probably more than just a little bit similar, and here's the poor NASA engineers who first off have to figure out what is this stuff in the first place (pretty sure there were no as-built drawings for whatever old bridge or abandoned factory that got taken apart to furnish the raw material that the falsework was constructed from), and what kind of shape is that material in anyway, and was it good steel when it was originally rolled in the mill, and is it rusted, or perhaps fatally-weakened with well-hidden internal stress and/or corrosion cracking, or is it otherwise structurally compromised in some other devious and non-apparent way?
...and Wilhoit's out there just blazing away at it (go back to the monochrome enhanced version of the photograph and start looking around at the welds where the interior diagonal pipe braces come together and consider what you're looking at there, and elsewhere), not waiting around for anybody's blessing or approval ahead of time, and yeah, I can just imagine all the fun everybody had with that little element of things as it was going on.
Buncha damn junkyard scrap iron, and now it's holding up our nearly-finished RSS, which now weighs in the millions of pounds, and it sure would be nice if it keeps on doing that, and doesn't decide to suddenly... fail.
But Cecil knew, and Red knew, and that's that, and the RSS stayed up in the air, right where they built it, of course.
And if you go back and look close at the picture of the RSS going up on A Pad, you can see that they still needed falsework over there too, on top of the Mobile Launcher, only a little less of it is all, and by golly, it's some of the exact same bridge-demo rat-hole stuff, the weirdie dual-member, crosshatched with x-bracing stuff too, so it turns out that although the look of things is dramatically different between the two approaches to erecting the RSS on the two different pads, the actualities are not nearly so different as you might at first suppose, based on a too-quick look at the external appearances of things.
And the Falsework stayed up over there, and carried the RSS until the RSS could carry itself, just like the Falsework carried the RSS at Pad B, until the RSS was fully self-supporting.
So.
Cecil Wilhoit knew exactly what he was doing, the whole time.
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