The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B

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


Page 24: Elevation 112' Lower Hypergol World, TSM Hinged Stair of Doom.

Pad B Stories - Table of Contents

Image 025. From the lowest main floor level of the Rotating Service Structure at Launch Complex 39-B, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, we find ourselves looking across toward the northeast, at the fuel side of the elevation 112’-0” floor grating, APU/APS access platforms, Orbiter Mold Line framing cutout with removable handrail posts and safety chains, and the APU Valve Complex Access Doors, with the Hinged Tail Service Mast Access Stair hanging out over empty space above and to the right, with a slice of the Flame Trench and Pad Deck in view, and beyond that the Sound Suppression System Water Tower, with the LH2 Burn Pond as a lighter-shaded rectangular area in the grass beyond it, and to the right of that, the cross-country cryo line which facilitated Liquid Hydrogen fill and drain operations from the very large Dewar it was stored in, a tiny bit of which can be seen in the distance on the far right margin of the photograph, behind the framing steel which makes up the top of the MLP East Stair Tower, also only partly visible on the far right margin. Photo by James MacLaren.
We have come down one level from where we took our previous photograph and we find ourselves down on the 112'-0" level of the RSS, in the vicinity of the Hypergol Umbilical Carriers, highlighted here on 79K14110 sheet M-44 (Their location is not quite visible in this photograph,  being just out of frame to the left, and which had not even been fabricated and installed at this time, and more about which, in just a bit.) near the cutout in the floor framing that accommodated the Orbiter's tail.

This is the lowest main level of that part of the RSS which constitutes the great span of the Rotary Bridge, and immediately beneath the steel-bar grating which is supporting your boots, and which your eyes can clearly see right through when you're looking along the length of the bars as opposed to across their length, there exists nothing else to keep you up there, above a six-story gap of thinnest air which separates you from the cold hard concrete of the Pad Deck.

This is also one of the nastiest areas on the whole Pad, insofar as it's where hypergolic propellants were pumped into the rear end of the Space Shuttle, for the Orbital Maneuvering System, the Aft Reaction Control System, and the Auxiliary Power Units, about which there was nothing whatsoever "auxiliary", and which were, in fact, something that the Orbiter could not fly without (and you really should read this document all the way through, there's some pretty scary stuff in there), and which constitute a whole fully-developed world, unto and all by themselves, which, in the beginning, could have gone in any of several very different design directions, not least amongst which was one that proposed the use of LOX and LH2 as bi-propellants, instead of the hydrazine monopropellant which NASA finally settled on and built, and which in the end was not invoked, but the mere fact that an outfit like Rocketdyne considered LOX/LH2 bi-propellant as perfectly feasible and doable, should give you to understand at least some of the complexities inherent in these things..

Let us work from left to right, identifying what we're seeing in our photograph at the top of this page, as much as we can, and we need to keep in mind that the platforms in here are tricky, and will do their best to cause you to misapprehend their locations. The relevant contract drawing showing us the layout of this stuff is 79K14110 sheet A-13, but it fails to match the photograph in several ways, and I have altered it to reflect the as-seen (in our photograph) configurations of the two differing OMS/APS platform sets, as well as the de-mate orientation of the RSS with the FSS, and you can see that altered version of A-13, here.

Phew, this stuff will really throw you, if you let it.

Ok, what are we looking at here?

First off, attention needs to be paid to one of the things that's not being looked at, and that would be the Hypergol Umbilical Carriers, which I mentioned before, and which show up in the unaltered version of A-13, but not the altered version of it, because the altered version, of course, has been altered to bring it into some kind of reasonable agreement with what's showing in the photograph.

So right away, things on one version of A-13 are simply missing when compared to the altered version.

And even in both versions, there is much shown on the drawings, that does not exist in the photograph.

Outlines for a lot of equipment noted on the drawing as "(NIC)" are sprinkled around all over the place down here.

NIC stands for Not In Contract, and wherever you see it on a drawing, it's telling you that something, at some point, is going to be occupying whatever space that it's shown occupying, but it's not your responsibility as a contractor to furnish and install it.

Here's what's named on the drawing. None of which shows in the photograph, because it all came later. Much later.


APU Valve Complex. (Auxiliary Power Unit)

APU Service Panel.

APS Fuel Purge Panel. (Aft Propulsion System, which includes the large Orbital Maneuvering System motors plus the smaller Reaction Control System motors)

APS Fuel He Service Panel. (Helium)

MMH Valve Skid. (MonoMethyl Hydrazine, which is the hypergolic fuel)

APS Fuel GN2 Panel. (Gaseous Nitrogen)

Comp Air Sta. (Compressed Air Station)

APS Oxidizer Purge Panel.

APS Oxidizer He Service Panel.

N2O4 Valve Skid. (Nitrogen Tetroxide, which is the hypergolic oxidizer)

APS Oxidizer GN2 Panel.


Needless to say, there was a lot going on down at the 112'-0" elevation, and all of it was outstandingly toxic and dangerous.

Interestingly enough, on the original version of drawing A-13, the one thing that is not named, even though most of the foregoing named stuff works with, through, and around it, and is the whole purpose for that set of systems, is the Hypergol Umbilical Carriers, although they are both shown in outline, in their extended, service, positions. This is what they would look like, and where they would be, fuel left, oxidizer right, when the carrier plates at the ends of their cat racks were butted up against the aft end of the Space Shuttle, filling, draining, purging, and otherwise servicing the hypergolic propellant systems back there.

I have been unable to find ANYthing about the Hypergol Umbilical Carriers, ANYwhere, and the best I can do right now, to show one of them to you, is to use this screenshot from one of the OUTSTANDING gigapans which are hosted at nasatech.net by John A. O'Connor, and who advises that Ken Thornsley, former NASA Photo Editor, and Charlie Parker, Site Escort, are the people directly responsible for us being able to see all of the breathtaking gigapan imagery of Pad A, which you can find here http://nasatech.net/ntSubPad39A_PAGE.html.

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NOTE: INSERTED AUGUST 08 2022

The Hypergol Umbilical Carrier drawings have been located and acquired. 79K24048 Mechanical package.

I am leaving this (Part 1) section of the narrative alone, and will include the newly-found drawings when the narrative returns to the subject of the Hypergol Umbilical Carriers, in Part 2.
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For now, alas, the Hypergol Umbilical Carrier will just have to be represented by this far less than adequate image, where I have done my best to highlight it, but please be advised that this image is showing you a massively modified area from the one I worked at (It's not even the right pad. It's Pad A, and by the time John got set up to do his gigapans, Pad B was already GONE.) and what you're seeing is, more or less, the scattered bones of a Hypergol Umbilical Carrier that once was, but no longer is, and the rest of this area suffers in the exact same manner, but apparently, that's all the Wise Operatives at NASA PAO see fit to give us, so that's all we get, and that's all there is to it. Period.

As of the time of this writing (Spring, 2021) something seems to have gone terribly wrong with the people staffing the NASA Public Affairs Office at KSC and they have become far less than helpful for anyone who wishes to spread the word, show people what's out there, and acknowledge in any meaningful way the stunningly-deep historical significance of the facilities under their purview. Regards the egregious cultural gaffes, which now seem, alas, to have become NASA KSC PAO policy, and all of which serve to blind curious eyes and deflect curious questioning, one can only hope for a future enlightenment in this particular bureaucratic backwoods, and we must bide our time in peace until that brighter day dawns. Perhaps one day I will get to gleefully delete this paragraph, but that day is not today, unfortunately.

Later on, when I returned to the Pad, working for Ivey Steel, there was a contractual dispute involving the Hypergol Umbilical Carriers which were shown on a drawing with a small "NIC" next to them, and it made it as far as a court case, but in the end we lost, and wound up paying for this pair of outrageously complex and expensive items out of our own pocket. Sigh.

Note that in their extended position, the cat racks come out and toward the Orbiter at an angle, and come very close to the folding OMS Access Platforms (located at the top of a short stair at elevation 114'-7" roughly two and a half feet above the level of the surrounding floor) which are squarely-aligned with, and in immediate proximity to, the Orbiter's tail when they are in their unfolded service positions, and clearance for the extended cat rack on the Hypergol Umbilical Carrier is what causes the far ends of these platforms to have that funny-looking angled cut on the outboard side of their far end (the funny-looking angled cut on the inboard side comes with a compressible bumper) and compressible bumpers are all over the place, and once you start looking for them, you start finding them, and the compressible bumper is telling us its side of things is shaped the way it is because of its very-close proximity to the Space Shuttle, which sways around a little bit in the wind, causing it to be moving in relationship to the much-more-rigid RSS, and if it sways a little too close to things (which they calculated it never would, and of course it never did, but still...) if it ever was to encounter the physical RSS, their insurance policy on this extremely-unlikely event came in the form of soft material that would be touched first, and which would not damage the Space Shuttle as a result.

In addition to the pair of folding platforms, there was also a pair of pivoting platforms, which swung around side to side, supported by a fairly large bearing.

These are the platforms highlighted in yellow that I've already shown you in the altered version of A-13, with both of them pivoted around to match their positions in the photograph. It might look as if these pivoting platforms are interfering with the Hypergol Umbilical Carriers, and if you look at the unaltered version of A-13, you can clearly see there's some overlap there, but these pivoting platforms were down low and hugged the floor, and also had a set of special hinged handrails that could be laid down completely out of the way, flat on their top surfaces, whereas the moving portions of the Hypergol Umbilical Carriers were up away from the floor, and passed above the pivoting platforms without hitting them when their handrails were laid down flat.

Phew.

Lotta stuff going on down here, eh?

And now, at long last, I can show you where all this stuff is, in the photograph, which remains just as confusing as it originally was, but hopefully things will get a little better here in just a bit.

So ok. So here's the visible end of our Oxidizer-Side Folding OMS/APS Access Platform.

This one.

And you might immediately notice that the Compressible Bumpers on it have been covered up with... something.

And that "something" is a white painter's tarp, and it has badly overexposed in this image, and serves to add to the confusion in the form of an amorphous blob of featureless white, which cannot in any way be understood in terms of "this" or "that" or "here" or "there" and that's one of the main reasons I went to the trouble to cut it all out, nice and neat, so as your eyes could now be given a fighting chance to make some kind of rudimentary sense out of what they're looking at.

And now, the visible portions, painter's tarp over Compressible Bumper and all, of the Fuel-Side Folding OMS/APS Access Platform over on the other, the farther away, side.

This one.

And now, now that you've seen them both, all nice and neat in cutout view, clearly shown, clearly labeled, clearly everything I could possibly do to make it clear, you can perhaps now appreciate the insane level of difficulty in actually seeing what it is, sitting there in plain sight, that you're looking directly at!

With this particular platform set, the visual difficulties are multiple, reinforce one another, and comprise (but are not strictly limited to), the form of the angled platform ends, which your eye wants very much to convert to the same layout squareness of everything else, and in so doing turn the whole area into a unpleasantly-confusing optical illusion, and then, on top of that, the forwardmost support post for the removable handrails on the inboard faces (facing the Orbiter's tail) of the platforms is not located where the horizontal handrail pipes take that funny bend where the platform is cut and angled to clear the Orbiter, which gives the horizontal pipes extending beyond the bend, past the place where the angle is, a particularly tricky set of lighting and perspective effects which significantly exacerbate the optical illusion, and then if that's not enough, there's the lack of toeplate on the opposite, longer angled-cut side of the platforms, facing the Hypergol Umbilical Carrier (which is not visible in the photograph because of course it hasn't even been built yet), throwing yet another visual monkey wrench into things, and of course then there's the tarp over the Compressible Bumpers, and then you get yet another oddball angle in the form of the Orbiter Mold Line cut along the forward edge of the main floor framing (which we haven't even talked about yet). And hey, why not, let's toss in multiple chance alignments of differing horizontal handrail members and vertical support posts, on different platforms, and on different sides of the same platform, including the yellow handrails on the pivoting platforms, plus the silvery removable handrail posts lining the precipice along the Orbiter Mold Line, just for good measure, whatta ya say?

Gah!

You want to understand the Launch Pad. You really do. But good gollamighty is it ever hard to do!

Looking right at it, knowing exactly what it is you're looking at!

And it's still almost impossible to do!

We've done it before, and I'm recommending we do it again, now. Open both versions of the photograph, showing the near platform in highlight, and the far platform in highlight, and open them in separate tabs in your browser. Then, blink back and forth between them to finally give your poor overworked brain a sporting chance to actually understand what the hell it's looking at.

Ahh..... there, that's better, isn't it?

Well... maybe.

The bumpers were soft, and were fabric-covered, and were just all around delicate things, which never belonged in a construction environment like this one, but we were instructed by NASA Contracting Administration to install them, like it or not, and so we did, and then we were further instructed to keep them from coming to the least bit of harm at the hands of chafing ropes and lines, splattered welding slag, and any number of all the rest of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune which will befall innocent people and things on a gigantic construction project, and the best anybody could do without expending unpleasantly-large sums of unreimbursable money on it was to cover the bumpers up with welding blankets, or painter's tarps, or whatever the hell might have been at hand for use, tie it on as best they could, and then hope that if anything ever happened to the bumper anyway, it would not be them that received the finger of suspicion, and all the rest of the jolly fun which flows therefrom.

Perhaps you're starting to get the idea that it's not enough to simply build the damn thing, hmm? And if so, you would be very much correct. There's more to it than that. There's much, much, more to it than that.

Sigh.

This frame is showing you the area down at elevation 112'-0" early on in things, and the hypergol systems were a long ways from going live at this time, so, despite there being plenty of other threats, from other quarters, there was no threat from the hypergol quarter at this time.

Near-center, coming down from out of the top edge of the frame and gently-curved near its bottom margin, just to the right of the white shade of one of the pad lighting fixtures and partially obscured by the dark vertical extent of a steel column and some dull-orange hose, can be seen one of the Hypergol Spill Ducts which was a vent to remove air that had been contaminated by poisonous fumes coming from spilled Nitrogen Tetroxide or Monomethyl Hydrazine, from up in the Payload Changeout Room, and which you sincerely hoped would never ever be needed, at all, or at least not while you were on the pad. The thought of ever seeing that thing start belching a dark rust-colored cloud, or (much more insidious and hard to spot) whitish, mostly see-through, wispy vapors, is a terrifying one, and something, thankfully, I never had to deal with on Pad B.

Several years later, over on Titan IV Pad 41, I did get to see both of these things, but it was under "controlled" conditions, and they were venting their systems from the top of vent pipes which stood almost 200 feet tall, which I suppose might sound nice, except for the fact that we were on top of the Umbilical Tower over there, at eye level with the tops of those vertical-standing vent pipes, and watching something as nasty as that, from unpleasantly-close range, wafting slowly away at a walking pace, on the light morning breeze, brought immediate questions to mind along the lines of, "What if the wind decides to switch?"

Later on, while we were still out there working at Pad B, the system DID go live, and I distinctly recall having been appointed by my boss to gather all of our ironworkers together one morning prior to going up on the towers and going to work, and giving them a specialized one-time safety lecture advising them that the goddamned thing was now LIVE, and some of the stainless-steel tubing and piping that was now fully-charged with horrifyingly-poisonous stuff had pretty thin walls, so please guys, try and be a little more careful with things from now on, especially with preventing arc-strikes caused by inadvertently dropping a live welding lead on to any of the nearby thin-wall piping, or otherwise just generally being very careful not to damage anything else in that live system, 'cause you just might kill us all if you do so.

Near-center, a little left and up, you have the APU Valve Complex Monorail Lifting Hoist Access Doors.

The left door panel is wide-open, and beyond it you can see bits of a few crossover platforms on the Hinge Column, as well as Hanger 104, running vertically down through the exact center of the opening, blocking a goodly portion of your view of Hinge Column crossovers behind it, and of course the usual snarl of hoses, lines, handrails, and even a lighting fixture, intervening and blocking a proper clear view of things elsewhere.

Look close, and you can see that Hanger 104 is almost, but not quite, blocking our view of Hanger 103, the barest sliver of which can be seen running along the right side of Hanger 104, looking for all the world as if it was the far flange on 104, but it's not, and it's actually 7'-9" on-center farther away from us, and to my eyes anyway, it doesn't look nearly as close to the Hinge Column Crossover Platforms behind it as it really is.

There's an awful lot of visual deception going on with this particular photograph. It's one of the very best examples, in the whole series, for demonstrating just how misleading steel structures can be when you're looking right at them, attempting to make good and accurate sense of what you're seeing.

This set of doors (there was another identical set of them on the opposite side of the elevation 112'-0" framing, over your shoulder behind you as you look toward the hinge column in the photograph) which provided access for the APU Hoist which was supported by a small trolley that ran along the bottom flange of the monorail beam passing through the middle of the doorway up at the very top, was quite interesting and also quite dangerous.

We'll do the interesting part first.

We're in Lower Hypergol World down here (we'll do Upper Hypergol World in a bit), and an awful lot of the equipment used to deal with hypergolic fuel and oxidizer (we're looking at the fuel side of things in this view) was stuff that, for more than one, good and sufficient, reason, was stuff they did not want to leave laying around down here all the time, and so they fixed things up so as the equipment, when needed, could be rolled out on top of the MLP or on the Pad Deck, directly underneath whatever it was that it would be needed for and picked up with a hoist like you see it here on 79K14110 sheet M-40, lifted to the proper elevation, and then, since the hoist perforce needed to be working over the side in order to reach its desired gear down there on the Pad Deck, they would roll the hoist, which was itself hanging beneath a wheeled trolley, along the length of a monorail beam, which extended inboard, into the main working area where the work got done, where the hoist could be stopped in the right place, and the load it was carrying let down the few feet or few inches it needed to be let down, placing the desired equipment right where it was needed in order to do its job. And when the work was done, the process would be reversed, and the equipment would be picked up by the hoist once again and trolleyed back out over the edge of the structure, where the hoist would then let the equipment all the way back down to wherever it came from, where it could be retrieved by the people who were responsible for it, and taken back to whatever safe (in more than one way) place it originally came from.

A little involved perhaps, but it was a really nice system for doing stuff like this, and there were hoists sprinkled around the RSS for lifting and handling a wide variety of equipment, to and from a wide variety of places.

Our doors are just one part of what allows all this stuff to work. We need to be able to get the APU Valve Complex, from a starting point down on the MLP, up to the elevation 112'-0" floor steel, through the doors, to its final working position amongst all the other stuff down here, which you get to see, labeled, on 79K14110 sheet A-13.

Keep in mind, please, when looking at all the neato stuff they're showing you on A-13, that anything "APU" deals with the Orbiter's Auxiliary Power Units, which provided hydraulic power to stuff on the Orbiter that requires it (landing gear, engine gimballing, aero surfaces, and other absolutely life-and-death critical systems. Anything APS, deals with the Orbiter's Aft Propulsion System, which is the OMS Motors, and that's another one where everybody dies if it ever quits working, and all of this stuff used differing amounts and components of hypergol, and they wanted to keep such violently-corrosive and lethally-toxic crap all in the same place as much as they could, in the interests of better corralling it, and better keeping it from getting loose of them, and despite our being on the APS Servicing Platform down here, there's more than enough APU stuff also kicking around down here, so... kinda mind that, ok?

Interestingly enough, just getting the Valve Complex into position was not enough, all by itself.

They also needed to get the APU Umbilical into place as seen on 79K14110 sheet M-42, flush up against the side of the Orbiter with the plumbing securely connected and sealed to keep all that terrible hypergol from, god forbid, getting away from them, and to do that they needed a second hoist-and-monorail setup (which did other stuff too, but enough already), over the steel-bar grating on the next platform level above, which was near, but not exactly at, the RSS Main Floor at elevation 135'-7".

Pretty complicated deal, all the way around, but when you're handling hypergol, you don't go cutting corners. ANYwhere.

So ok, so that's how that got done, and of course, as a part of doing all that, sometimes the stuff being moved around had to go through walls, and whenever that kind of thing happened, then the offending part of the wall would be turned into a door and that way everything stayed happy, everything worked, and all was well with the world.

Since the hoist-support monorail beam which held the whole works up needed to be quite strong and sturdy, it became a part of the structure, and tied directly to whatever substantial structural framing there might be, immediately above it, and any doors that the hoist and its load might need to go through on their way from here to there would need to be floor-to-ceiling in height, and of course that's exactly what you're seeing here. A pair of oddly-tall doors, except that now you know why, which means they're not odd at all, right?

So now that we know what's going on with the interesting aspect to our oddly-tall doors, let's move on to the dangerous aspect.

Check out this drawing that gives us the particulars of our doors, in detail.

Check out this SIGN!

On the Rotating Service Structures at Launch Complex 39, down at their lowest main platforming elevations, there was a matched set of doors, one pair of doors on each outboard side of the structure. And immediately past that set of doors, there was.....

.....a six-story free drop through thinnest air, all the way down to the concrete of the Pad Deck.

Whoa! Now, to their credit, they did fix things up so you had to actually lift that sign up and out of the way, in order to open the doors, but...

Have you ever met anyone in your life who you still think might be perfectly capable of lifting that sign up to open the doors in one of their typically absent-minded dazes, and still bone-headedly walk right out over open space and promptly fall to their death, anyway?

And yeah, there was that pair of safety chains in the opening too, but if you've ever encountered "safety" chains in the real world, you immediately learn that they are not to be trusted in the slightest. The catenary of the chain will, completely without any return force to let you know you're entering a bad place, give, just a bit, just a few inches, before it abruptly comes steel-taut with your overbalanced, too-high-center-of-mass weight moving against it (if you're one of those unfortunates who, despite everything else, managed to encounter the chain unawares), in motion, and the result of that would be a nice flip as you suddenly found yourself ass-over-teacups spinning to your death on the distant concrete far below you.

In truth, the RSS was a deathtrap, and it had no end of hidden deadfalls patiently waiting for the unaware to come along and encounter them unexpectedly.

Brrr.

Careful there, Lou. Be careful about walking through those doors there, ok?

Walking along down at the 112'-0" elevation and idly opening the door with one hand, while looking at something on a clipboard in your other hand, or perhaps your phone, or perhaps being suddenly called for by someone over on the other side of the area causing you to turn your head the other way, even as you keep on stepping, failing to give full and complete attention at all times to your surroundings as you do so (And who among us can say with complete honesty that they've never walked through a door in this manner?), will be SEVERELY PUNISHED.

So. Just another day on the Launch Pad.

And we're not done with this kind of stuff yet, either.

To the right of the hypergol spill duct, extending out and beyond the farther-distant SSW water tower like some kind of crazed invitation for suicidal high-divers, is the Hinged TSM Access Stair, which could be flipped up, out of the way, to allow the RSS to swing around and mate with the Space Shuttle sitting on top of the MLP, without smashing into the Tail Service Mast, which it provided access to.

This is yet another surprisingly-complex area, and yet another area where things that do not exist in the photograph (the Tail Service Mast) play a very large role in the lives of the things that do show in the photograph. Without the TSM and the Orbiter, it's hard to appreciate the claustrophobicly-narrow confines between Orbiter Wing and Tail Service Mast, which this hinged stair was lowered down into, twenty feet above the steel deckplates of the MLP.

Here's a marked-up drawing that shows us all the main players, and how they all fit together with each other.

The stair as we see it in our photograph is bereft of proper guard or fall protection, and instead, what we have here is a stop-gap rope affair cobbled together by the ironworkers. Union Ironworkers will never have a problem with killing themselves by going over the side, off of the tower and down to the Pad Deck from this stair, with or without anything by way of safety apparatus, but they're not the only people up on the tower, and so, in the least amount of time (remember, time is money out here, and who's paying?) they could get away with, they slapped whatever it is that's on that stair into place, shrugged their shoulders, and moved on to more-productive pursuits elsewhere.

Also, a close look at high zoom will reveal the handrails on the stair to be incomplete in some way, and no, I have no recollection of what was going on with this stair on the day I took this photograph.

So it will just have to remain a mystery as to what was going on that stopped things where we see them, knocking the crew off work and sending them elsewhere.

A very dangerous mystery, I might add.

Sitting there in your comfortable chair reading these words, you might find it hard to imagine how anyone could be so stupid as to walk, or even simply stumble off of the end of something like this, but up on the tower, in the heat of work, things took on a completely different, and much more hazardous, aspect, that mere armchair observers can never share in, understand, or otherwise relate to, intelligently.

It's different up there, that's all.

Just ask anybody who's been there.

Stories of close calls, injuries, and lost lives abound, and it's always some kind of absurdly-long-odds proposition wherein the thing that wound up getting somebody was a thing that no one, in their wildest dreams, would ever have imagined might actually come to pass.

But it did.

And it does.

And it will continue to do so, and for that reason, one must everlastingly be on their guard, outward appearances bedamned.

In the far distance, below the hinged-stair-of-doom, the placid waters of the Atlantic Ocean give no hint of the look they can take on every once in a while in the months of August, September, and October.

The whole place, from one end to another, can really fool you, and has no end of creative ways to do so.

Below and beyond the TSM Access Stair, the pad deck, which in no way indicates that it's fifty feet in elevation above the green grass beyond it, bristles with an array of equipment we are by now becoming familiar with, including a bit of the North Piping Bridge, LH2 Service Tower, SSW headers, MLP Mount Pedestals, Pneumatics Tower, and on the far right margin, a narrow vertical slice of the East MLP Stair Tower. Beyond the Pad Deck itself, the SSW Water Tower, and the LH2 Burn Pond beyond that.

Angling up and to the right across the distant grass, you can see the arrow-straight run of cross-country cryo piping that took liquid hydrogen to and from the very large dewar it was stored in, out near the pad perimeter, as well as just the smallest dark bit of the curved ball of the dewar itself, mostly obscured by the top of the East MLP Access Stair Tower, on the extreme right-hand edge of the frame.

Are we done yet?

Yeah, I think we're done.

Or at least I'm done.

Go get yourself a cold one.

You've earned it.


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