The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 59: The Crawlerway, The Ziggurat, and The Buried Stone Castle - More Lingering Shadows of Apollo.
| Pad B Stories - Table of Contents |
John Foster (left), and James Dixon (right).
John was married to James' sister, if memory serves, which means he's James' brother-in-law. Family. Union Ironworkers out of the Local 808 Union Hall oftentimes came in family groups. And from job to job, year to year, the same names, the same families would recur again and again. It was a very tight-knit little world.
Take a look at the expression on James' face. Such a marvelous mixture of amusement, suspicion, contempt, wonderment, and disdain, all at the same time. Such a look! Renaissance-painting-level shit. I marvel at my good luck to have hit the shutter release at the exact perfect time to have snatched this look right out of thin air, during the fleeting sub-second moment of its existence.
I got along really well with almost all of the ironworkers (as with anywhere else, there's always one or two knot-heads that you're never going to get along with), James and John included, but there was always this distance, this tinge of suspicion, that adhered to things no matter what else might have been going on.
I was management after all, and there's always going to be some residual distrust, just based on that alone, and I was also some strange surf-bum guy from the local beach completely unlike everybody else out there working, with absolutely no qualifications or proper background with ironworking to even the most tangent degree, and as such was regarded with an everpresent slight whiff of ..... I don't even know exactly what to call it, but it was always there, and it's on James' face in this shot, and John just thought it was funny, some weird guy coming up to them with a goddamned camera of all weird-ass things, wanting to take their picture, of all weirder-ass things, and nobody had the slightest sense of history, or of who they might be or become, or what they might be doing or wondering or thinking about, twenty or thirty or forty years on down the road somewhere, nevermind any of the larger aspects to what was really going on.
That kind of stuff was screamingly, blindingly, obvious to me, even if not another soul out there seemed to share my viewpoint on things to the point of believing that going to the time and trouble to finagle a permit in the first place, and then walking around with a camera in hand, grabbing shots of this world as it occurred day-to-day in the second place, might be a worthy endeavor.
And, for myself, my attitude was "Fuck this shit, and fuck these people, I'm gonna grab every last motherfucking shot, every single time I can, and I just don't give a rat's ass about what any of them think," and that's exactly what I did. It put me in a somewhat lonesome position, cut away from the main herd as a noticeable outlier, but I was happy to roll right along, completely on my own, trusting my own instincts above those of everyone else.
I was feet on the ground, rubbing shoulders one-on-one with the workers and the overseers, hearing the shouts, smelling the smells, and getting covered with the dust that hung in the air, while the fucking Pyramids were being constructed, and I had the presence of mind to document the motherfucker photographically, as it happened, as seen from the inside, as seen and experienced by those who were there and who did the work.
And you know what? I was right, goddamnit. Go have yourself a good hard long-term look around the internet, or the Library of Congress, or the Smithsonian Institution, or NASA's own archives, or anywhere else you might choose, right this minute and see if you can find anything besides these pictures of mine, that details this Space Shuttle Program, this launch pad as it was being built, this place, at this time, with these people, doing these things. Best of fucking luck with it. Very best of fucking luck indeed. I may not be much, but I'm all you're ever going to get, and I know it. So fuck you, too.
Alright, calm down MacLaren.
What else might be going on with this photograph?
Well... how 'bout that Crawlerway John and James are standing on? What about that thing?
It's not just a patch of plain concrete they're standing on there, right?
And we're pretty close to it with our photograph, so how 'bout we dig in with it and see what's going on with it?
Where might a thing like the Crawlerway wind up taking us as we delve into its details on this page?
And we're standing at the terminal end, the business end, of a double-ended thing which extended four and a third miles in length from its starting point beneath your feet in the shadow of the VAB here, to the point up on the Pad Deck at Pad B which you're seeing in the photograph at the top of this page.
That linked NASA image shows the "363-foot-high Apollo 12 Saturn V," and it tells us that the Crawler-Transporter beneath it was carrying a "12.8 million pound load," (which is the total weight of the Saturn V plus the Mobile Launcher it was sitting on top of), and that's a pretty good data point to begin our investigations into just exactly what John and James are standing on in our own photograph.
We are now dealing with legacy infrastructure.
We are now dealing with the unaltered original installations which date back to the Apollo Program, as conceived and implemented by the people who built it all from scratch, and whose intent in building it was flying people to the moon and back.
So ok. Different hardware. Different infrastructure. Different Space Program.
But it's Good Stuff, and the Space Shuttle Program was happy to use it, and it was more than adequate for the tasks it would be required to do for the Space Shuttle, but to actually understand it, we will need to go back in time, just like we did on Page 41, and get the original story from the original Apollo drawings and documentation.
So let's go all the way back to look at one of the original Project Apollo drawings from 1963 and maybe size up the Vicinity Plan in one of its very first incarnations (we already know about how this stuff is constantly changing over time, right?), to get our bearings, ok?
And of course, what you're seeing here is a result of what came earlier, and as we discussed way back on Page 6, that which came earlier flowed from an initial series of agreed-upon first premises which then demanded the final form which the hardware used to implement them had to take.
And squarely in the center of things, with everything else flowing and cascading down away from it, was the Saturn V, which itself was what resulted from the final decision to use Lunar Orbit Rendezvous, as the technique most likely to actually be doable in the first place, to meet the laughably absurd, plucked-out-of-thin-air, demand (with ample funding being suddenly firehosed into the program, and without which nothing could have ever happened, never forget) to somehow get human beings down to the surface of the goddamned Moon and back, before the decade of the 1960's ended.
Prior to settling on LOR as the way forward, there were earlier incarnations of the Vicinity Plan, some of which made allowances for much larger Space Launch Vehicles than a Saturn V, and it was the inclusion of these much larger vehicles into the preliminary plans, which demanded the acquisition of sufficient land to enable the implementation of those larger vehicles, should they have been included in the final design premises, and that earlier, much more preliminary, incarnation looked like this, and if you look at the size of those 120 DB (decibel) radii up in the NOVA area, you can start to get maybe an inkling of the energy levels they found themselves having to grapple with in order to get something off of the ground that could do the job it was given to do.
Here it is again, in somewhat different form, taken from a frightening document created (January 1964) back when they were seriously considering using a large, high-energy Nuclear Reactor Powered upper stage, placed on top of a Saturn V. At the time, they deemed it "safe." How nice. How very very nice to know that they thought it was safe enough to DO. Read this thing. This is what they were working on. This is what they wanted to DO.
When you get time, maybe take a little jaunt down the NERVA rabbit hole. Scary place. They actually built this thing, and made it as far as actively hot-fire testing it on the ground, and they came about an inch away from flying it before it finally got canceled in 1973. Brrr.
And since we've already come this far with it, let's go ahead and include a few samples of the proposed flight hardware stuff that was in the air, back in the days when the infrastructure for whatever launch vehicles that might finally get decided upon and funded to eventually fly from the Merritt Island Launch Area, was mid-transition from concepts to actual installations.
What I'm including below is only glancingly related to the main subject body of these photo-essays, just the tip of an exceedingly-large iceberg that can be found in disparate locations scattered widely across the far reaches of the internet and elsewhere, which I cannot delve further into here, and some of which is very obscure and located in places that make it hard to come up with search terms which will prize it out of the dense rocky matrix concealing it. But it rewards extra time and creativity spent in chipping away at it, yielding no end of fascinating nuggets and glinting jewels of long-lost information, and I'll give you a launching-off point for some of your further explorations by pointing you toward Heroic Relics (heroicrelics.org), which is, in itself, a treasure trove of stuff, and I'll link to the Launch Complexes 39A, 39B, 39C, and 39D page, and let you soldier on from there with it. It's good stuff. Really GOOD stuff.
I now give you below, in no rigorous order, the following stuff from the late 1950's to the mid 1960's which includes a fair bit of Project NOVA (which was never really an actual "Project" but instead consisted of a diffuse cloud of differing Big Rocket design studies, proposals, and wish-lists extending over a period of some years, aimed at and requested by differing agencies at different times, for different reasons, and none of which ever coalesced into anything that showed up in the real world above and beyond some of the land acquisitions which eventually formed the Kennedy Space Center).
THE NATIONAL SPACE VEHICLE PROGRAM, Prepared by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, In consultation with the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense, dated January 27, 1959. This is pretty early on, and NOVA appears in this document as being fairly innocuous (although at the time, it was no such thing, and constituted a radical upscaling), back in the days when they were still simply trying to keep shit from blowing itself to hell shortly after pushing the button, and had yet to achieve anything remotely resembling reliable flight at the time these words were committed to paper.
Comments on a number of relationships between Saturn and Nova vehicles, by Abraham Hyatt, Assistant Director for Propulsion, dated August 24, 1959.
REPORT OF COMBINED WORKING GROUP ON VEHICLES FOR MANNED SPACE FLIGHT.
Martin Marietta's POST SATURN SUMMARY REVIEW Launch Vehicle Study, Oct. 1964, is where things really start to ramp up, and although it doesn't strictly qualify, since it was created after they had already settled on Saturn V, I'm including it here because even back before they made their final commitment to the Saturn V, this kind of stuff was in the air, and once you dig down into it, maybe all the way down to Page 28, where you can find the 24.7 million pound monstrosity that's buried way down in there, you can kind of begin to get a sense of the sort of things that might have happened, but did not.
And Martin wasn't the only one, either. General Dynamics had their own version of things, and it went by the title of A STUDY OF EARLY MANNED INTERPLANETARY MISSIONS FINAL SUMMARY REPORT CONTRACT NO. NAS 8-5026, and it was dated January 31, 1963, and it runs to 710 pages, and it's not light reading, and it starts out with too many graphs to count, but when you dig down in there, you get to a place where the stuff that the graphs are giving you energy profiles (and no end of other jolly stuff) for, emerges in similar fashion as the monsters that live under the bed coming out to eat you, and some of 'em are pretty fucking radical, although the poor reproduction quality makes it hard to visualize some of them, but try, anyway, and in particular give the dimension lines some scrutiny to get a load of the size of these things. I'll send you to Page 371, and you can do a little scrolling down from there, and admire stuff as you go along.
And since I'm such a nice guy, I saved the best for last, and here's a combined pdf file of three separate installments of Quest Magazine from 1992 and 1993 containing a very well-researched treatment of the NOVA Program, written by Keith J. Scala, and Glen E. Swanson, entitled They Might Be Giants - A History of Project NOVA, 1959 - 1964, and it's loaded with all kinda cool shit, and some of it is so far off the scale as to beggar the imagination, and to think that highly-trained engineering groups were dead-serious ready to GO with this stuff takes your breath away. I'll leave it up to you to find the never-built thing that was intended to have a total liftoff thrust of 56.2 MILLION POUNDS, and consider the implications of such a thing, writ large, in metal and propellants.
So ok.
So the Crawlerway didn't turn out to be as big and strong as it might have been, but it was still plenty big and strong anyway, and the whole place was significantly overdesigned for the Saturn V's that finally wound up launching from it, just in case something else, perhaps something larger, might wind up getting built and might further require the use of some or all this whole facility, and our ironworkers in the photograph up at the top of this page are standing on the Crawlerway that got built, so how 'bout we get with the program here and learn how it worked, in the form that it actually took when it was built?
Back to our initial Vicinity Plan, which I've marked up, and which is a Pad 'A'-vintage document. Notice, please, that the overall layout of Launch Complex 39 is significantly different from what was actually built, and as of the dates for this set of as-builts, only Pad 39-A existed with any kind of proper substance to it, along with a Crawlerway included under the corresponding Scope of Work that went nowhere else, but they also clearly intended to build additional pads along with matching Crawlerway segments leading to them. What became my very own Pad B is shown, labeled "Future Pad", and as a special bonus, what would have become (but never did) Pads C and D are also shown, also labeled "Future Pad."
Here's that same Vicinity Plan again, marked up a little for you, from the Crawlerway drawings for Pad B, which is now included with its own name, and "Future Pad" C and D are still there, but of course we all know that part of things never did happen in the end.
And it's that "Future Pad" business that explains the funny bend in the Crawlerway, as it was finally realized in physical form, going from the main branch coming away from the VAB, out to Pad B itself. Here's yet another map, with yet another slightly different layout of the Pads and the routes the Crawlerways would take to them. None of this stuff agrees amongst itself, fully, and in the end, what got built, is what got built, and you can see that they were keeping their options as open as they could with this stuff, after construction had already started, not really knowing what those options might or might not turn into, in the real world of real facilities. They did the best they could with it.
Interestingly enough, in the very beginning, the pads at Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39 were going to be alphabetically named in the same order as they are at Cape Canaveral, with letter designation 'A' being used for the northernmost pad of any given grouping, and working down the alphabet southwards from there, but this NASA document, down at the bottom of page 4, clearly states: "At the time of the original siting of launch complex 39, the three projected launch pads were designated in accordance with standard Missile Test Center practice from north to south as pads A, B, and C. In January 1963, to bring the identification system in line with construction and operational use schedules, the pad designations were reversed, the southernmost becoming pad A. Early documentation carries the original designations; the revised designations are used hereafter in the text. C. Bidgood, Chief, Facilities Off., "Reidentification of Launch Complex 39 Launch Pads," 7 Jan. 1963.", so what we know as "Pad A" was originally "Pad C" (which gives us a pretty good idea of how many pads they really thought they were going to have in the end), and since there were three of them originally, Pad B, in the middle, would be the only one with a name that never got changed. There's all kinda weird little details like this, all over the place, when you start to really drill down into this stuff, and I never grow tired of finding them, and giving them a bit of regarded consideration when I do.
Outside of the Pad Perimeter Fences, the Crawlerway was a simple-enough thing. It had to carry a moving load consisting of the Crawler Transporter, plus the Mobile Launcher sitting on top of it, plus the unfueled Saturn V sitting on top of the ML.
An undated Army Corps of Engineers press release from the period when construction of Complex 39 was underway tells us (down at the bottom of Page 2) that the total moving mass of the Crawler with its burden sitting on top of it was "17 1/2 million pounds" so there's our figure for what the Crawlerway was designed and built to carry.
So... pretty substantial load for the Crawlerway to bear.
Which means we're not going to be building just any old "road" down which things would travel.
Out across the open spaces between the VAB and the Pads, things were simple enough in concept, and the concept was that we're going to have to build ourselves a roadway across the existing countryside which consisted of a swamp, underlain by an awful lot of muck, and wet sand, and unconsolidated sediment, with a bedrock layer of limestone way down there somewhere, underneath it all.
So they took a zillion core borings all along the route the Crawlerway would take, and I don't have the corresponding drawing for Pad B, so I'm going to show you Pad A drawing CE-118 from Volume 1 instead, just to give you an idea of how this kind of civil engineering stuff works, and it shows the whole Crawlerway, from VAB to Pad, and it locates and identifies the zillion core borings, and it also shows you Station Locations (which show up on a lot of these Crawlerway drawings as "STA" followed by a number with a two-digit decimal on its end, and they use the Station Numbers to locate exactly how far along the length of the Crawlerway they are), so ok.
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Note: April 06, 2023.
The corresponding Pad B Core Boring and Crawlerway drawings have suddenly fallen out of the sky into my lap, and I'm going to drop a few of them into what follows (which was originally written using the Pad A drawings exclusively) but I'm not going to change what's below very much at all, because it's more or less exactly the same stuff for Pad A and Pad B, and does not sensibly alter anything you're about to read, and leaving the Pad A stuff in here constitutes leaving additional information, additional knowledge, in the finished narrative, and why in the world would I give myself extra work to remove additional knowledge, anyway? Just so you know, ok?
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So at any given Core Boring location, you then get some kind of representation of what the core was actually made of, all the way down, and you start looking at that stuff, and you immediately realize that Florida doesn't really even belong above sea level, and instead, the whole goddamned peninsula, for an awful long way down, is a bunch of loose sediment dragged down from distant higher elevations by action of the more-or-less constant flow of rivers, punctuated by occasional one-in-a-hundred-year, one-in-a-thousand-year, one-in-a-whothehellknows-year, giant flood events, until it wound up just a little ways beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
And this sediment which originally flowed more or less straight downhill got piled up over the eons in the location where we now find it, beginning more or less a half billion years ago, back in the Ordovician, by the littoral action of the shallowest part of the ocean working on the enormous sediment flow coming off of the continental margin for hundreds and hundreds of miles upcoast to the north, on both sides of the peninsula.
This constitutes a mind-boggling amount of material transport, every last bit of which, once it had entered the shallowest edge of the ocean right at the shoreline, kind of just got dragged along with the prevailing generalized flow of nearshore surf-zone water (which is in constant motion landward and seaward, spreading the north-to-south flow of sediment emplacement far and wide, east-to-west, jitterbugging back and forth across the landscape because of a sea level that never stays put, deep-time) created by those strongest winds which were most capable of creating larger waves, and it moves that shallow surf zone water, along with its burden of suspended sediment that gets picked up only when the surf is roughest and the littoral current is strongest, endlessly and everlastingly down toward the south, and out over the constantly-growing edge of things until the sediment dropped out of suspension down to the seabed in calming water, deep enough that wave and current action could no longer reach it and agitate it, and could no longer pick up and move their burden of formerly-suspended sediment.
And there it sat, only to be constantly covered, and re-covered, and re-covered again by what still keeps coming off of the bottom end of the Appalachian Mountains, and this is part of an even larger and even older thing that has endured the Atlantic Ocean opening up and then slamming shut, not once, but twice, and all of a sudden we're looking back into some seriously deep time, and all this stuff that makes Florida is just sort of piling up and piling up and piling up, and it gets heavy, and the land itself groans and readjusts itself downward under the accumulating weight of tens of thousands of square miles of it, trying to maintain isostatic equilibrium, and all that does is make more room just beneath the surf for more stuff to keep on getting slurried southbound downcoast in an accumulation of never-ending thin streaks located wherever the edge of the ocean happened to be at any given century and piled up and piled up and piled up, and in the end...
You get this stuff.
And what you're looking at is (highlighted) CB-1, which is a Core Boring that was taken more or less midway along the length of the Pad A Crawlerway in the area just before you get to the Pad B Crawlerway which branches off to the left as you're heading for the Pads from the VAB, in the area where they were going to be parking the Arming Tower (which got renamed the Mobile Service Structure), and from a structural point of view, from a load bearing point of view, it's over 200 feet of junk, until you finally get down to a layer of actual limestone with enough thickness to matter, but even that limestone gets described as "dense to finely granular, badly weathered, porous, pitted, small cavities" and it's got water flowing through it, noted as "Artesian flow," and they had to grout the borehole after they were done, presumably to keep it from turning into an artesian well and flooding the whole place with an endless flow of water up on the surface.
So. Rotten limestone overlain with over 200 feet of sand, silt, clay, and shell, in endless layers of differing variations, thicknesses, and orders of appearance.
Lovely. Just fucking lovely.
I can only imagine the eye-rolls that the people who were going to be taking their seventeen-and-a-half million pound load across this crap for three and a half miles, were giving each other when they first saw this kind of data.
Oh well, whatcha gonna do?
So ok. So we're going to have to fix things up with our roadway across this swamp so as it will carry our astoundingly heavy load, safely and reliably.
NASA Public Affairs Office (PAO) describes it thusly.
And in overview, for the whole Crawlerway to Pad B, it looks like this, and maybe make a note of those Station Numbers as you do so, 'cause they're what gets used to tell us how far along the crawlerway toward the Pad we are, at any given location.
And here it is again, on a drawing that gives you a better look at the Pad itself.
So here's a typical cross-section of things, on the Pad A leg of the Crawlerway instead, and while you're admiring this one, mind the vertical scale exaggerations which they had to introduce into things to allow you to even see them in the first place.
And what you're seeing in the drawing just above, had to get laid down over the hydraulic fill which itself got laid down into the empty space they had to create for it all the way down to below the water table by digging everything out so as they could create something a little more substantial to lay their nice new Special Roadway down on top of.
And yeah, it's not quite as straightforward and simple as it might at first appear, and there's power and comm and instrumentation and potable water and sanitary sewer and industrial water and fire water and high-pressure-gas nitrogen and helium and all the rest of that utilities stuff that you always encounter in a place like this, which comes in underground pipes and duct banks and above-ground pipe-support runs, and buried stuff and other stuff, and it all needs to be accounted for, but really, there's not too much going on here, and the real fun doesn't begin till we get to the Pad, so... let's go do that after we take one more look at it, in the pair cross-sections on the Pad B leg of the Crawlerway that you get on CE-114, ok?
And on CE-209 we can see that once we cross the threshold of the Pad Perimeter itself, and reach the toe of the Pad Slope, things start... changing.
And we begin transitioning from a Special Road, to a Great Earthwork, which contains within itself what amounts to a large stone castle, completely buried inside of it, with a stone shell covering its entire surface area, the "stone" being, of course, steel-reinforced concrete, which is actually stronger, cubic yard for cubic yard, than what castles were originally made of, back in the days of yore.
And to do that, they first needed to build themselves an 80-foot-tall ziggurat out there in the far reaches of the swamp, and it looked like this at first (once again, no Pad B images seem to have survived, sigh, so we're using a Pad A image instead), and then from there they had to let the loose hydraulic fill it was composed of settle and self-densify under the force of gravity to allow it to come to a state of stable compaction suitable for building and supporting ridiculously heavy and explosive objects, and once that was done, they could start finishing it off.
And for the actual Crawlerway part of things, you get a Profile on CE-221 and a Cross Section on CE-222 (mind those exaggerations in vertical scale that allow you to actually see things, and notice if you will, the concrete "shell" over the fill dirt which you get everywhere on the raised portion of the Pad), and all well and good. All the way up to what I've been calling, from day one (because that's what I learned it as via the spoken language of the Pad), the Pad Deck.
And once you make it up there to the place just past where the Pad Slope levels off and becomes the Pad Deck at elevation 53'-0", that's when things get interesting.
We've been here before, in greatest detail in multiple places back on Page 41, but elsewhere too, including Home Life Page 5, but all during those initial introductions to the innards of the Pad, I never discussed any of this except as a means to reach some other end, and I never really addressed this stuff in and of itself, and I didn't get into any of the nitty-gritty details of things, so...
Here we go.
The Crawlerway holds up the seventeen-and-a-half-million-pound, rocket-sitting-on-its-motor-carriage, as it trundles up to the top of the Launch Pad.
And the Launch Pad holds up the Crawlerway.
And the mud and muck and wet sand of the swamp holds up the Launch Pad.
And how might a thing like that get done?
First you decide where, and how expansive, your Pad is going to be, and you ruthlessly attack the existing landscape in that area with dredges, steam shovels, and bulldozers, utterly eradicating all existing vegetation, existing wetlands, existing wildlife, existing everything, and you bury it all beneath an initial layer of hydraulic fill and you then rough-level it, which you then let sit and self compact for a time.
And then you build yourself a ziggurat out of loose sand piled as more hydraulic fill, all the way up to eighty feet high, on top of the hydraulic fill you initially covered up the whole area with, and then you let your ziggurat settle and self-compact and densify for a while, thereby rendering itself, and the pre-existing swamp-earth you scraped down to, and then covered up beneath it, sufficiently stout, sufficiently sturdy, sufficiently strong.
And here, in drawing CE-247, you can see the levels of the existing landscape, the levels of the initial landscape created with the first round of hydraulic fill following the destruction of the existing wetlands, the landscape created following the second round of hydraulic fill which created the ziggurat, and also some of what wound up inside the ziggurat, about which much more later, but not right this minute.
(But don't kid yourself here, ok? In exchange for this very small fraction of the overall expanse of the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge, the rest of the Refuge was ensured survival, and permanently kept from turning into this shit, which every last one of Florida's horrifying oversupply of Moneguys, Realtors, Lawyers, Civic "Leaders," "Developers," Political wire-pullers and their Elected Cat's Paws, along with a vast army of additional Greedy Fucks of every imaginable stripe and color, and a few that cannot be imagined, want more than anything else in the whole world to happen as a direct result of their own actions, so as they can line their own evil pockets, give one of those little Republican Chuckles at the destruction they've created, and then start looking around for their next set of targets.)
And then, after that, you take your just-built ziggurat completely apart.
And then you fortify the living hell out of things all over the place internally where the missing portions of the ziggurat you just took completely apart used to be, by building your stone castle on what is now competent ground.
And then you fill it all back in with more sand, all around the stone castle you just built, and finish everything off with a shell of concrete which covers all of the raised portions of the gigantic thing you just brought into existence.
And of course, since there's two Pads, there's two stories, and for Pad B we did not even get a proper ziggurat to begin with, did not get a proper stepped pyramid temple mound to begin with, and following their experiences with things at Pad A, they determined they did not need to go to the additional effort and expense of creating steps and then bulldozing things around to smooth them up afterwards. So instead, they simply piled up their hydraulic fill straightaway in a single unbroken slope from bottom to top, without stepping back on the way up, but for the moment, I can find zero photographs of Pad B's hydraulic fill phase, and we must instead rely on the original Apollo drawings, which I do have, for both Pads. But, as I mentioned back on Page 41, those original drawings by Giffels & Rossetti are quite a bit less than "user friendly" to read, and in places, they're a downright bitch to read, and...
Ok, here's the Pad A ziggurat as depicted by G&R on CE-206, and there's three separate zones where the ground-elevation contour lines bunch closely together in a rectangular pattern, matching our photograph of the ziggurat exactly, indicating three separate areas where there's a significant slope headed upwards, which is exactly what we need to identify and verify that the overall shape of things was that of a large step pyramid, but then they had to go and smother the goddamned thing on their drawing by laying a large rectangular area of cross-hatching over it, sized and laid out in the most unfortunate way possible, telling us about something completely different, and what the hell were those guys thinking when they chose to do it this way? Pshit. But. We can still at least make sense of it, once we're on to their little game, and here's that CE-206 again, but this time it's highlighted to show you the outer boundaries of the cross-hatching which is defined as the area from X.626,600 to X.627,200, and Y.1,554,200 to Y.1,553,600, along with the little note in the middle of it advising which drawings to go to if you'd like to see things in there with enough detail to maybe actually build something.
And just to make double-damn good and sure you're understanding this crap, here it is one more time, with the sloped areas, the actual steps of the ziggurat, highlighted in blue, complete with a little relief-shading, top-left "illuminated."
And yeah, what the fuck were they thinking when they decided it would be a good idea to put that fucked-up cross-hatching in there the way they did? Who knows. Not me, that's for sure.
And then you go to the corresponding Pad B drawing, CE-206, which has the same "CE" number, but a different (four-digit) volume number of 7008 down there in the extreme bottom right corner, which distinguishes it from its Pad A doppelganger, and it plainly shows that there's no steps in the original giant sand pile, and...
It's less easy to make good sense of, but at least they toned it down with the stupid cross-hatching, and I'm not in a mood to do any more artwork or highlighting, and I'm gonna let you figure it out on your own, and in the end, yes, the information is there, but...
Like I said, it ain't easy.
But both versions clearly indicate that the sand pile got built, 80 feet in original height, nice and tall, nice and heavy to make sure the compaction and densification took, before subsequent operations required disassembling it, in order to create the Flame Trench, the Catacombs, the High Pressure Gas area, the ECS Room, the PTCR, the High Pressure Gas Piping Tunnel, the Electrical Tunnel, and a bunch of other stuff too, which eventually all wound up getting buried, once again, after they were done with pouring all of that concrete and emplacing all that infrastructure hardware, which had to happen out in the open, beneath the sky, as opposed to underground somewhere, thus demanding the temporary disassembly of things.
Now that you've seen a photograph of the original Pad A ziggurat, and have read and understood all of the foregoing, complete with engineering drawings to help you along with it, images of the construction of Pad A can now make complete sense, and you'll easily understand what you're seeing, what's going on with what you're seeing, and why things had to get done the way they got done.
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Note: June 16, 2023.
As a result of being put on to a very obscure and low-quality NASA source by Paul Cultrera, who manages the French website "de La Terre à la Lune : le programme Apollo, un fantastique voyage," I am now able to include a pair of photographs of the Pad B ziggurat, and just as the drawings have told us, it has no "steps" and instead grades smoothly from ground level to the flat expanse of its top surface in one unbroken slope. NASA really needs to do something about the pitiful state of their public-facing apparatus which is presently in charge of archived material such as this. Somebody needs to budget this sort of World History work properly, or, if such budgeting is already in place, then a clean sweep of all management personnel in charge of these offices needs to be undertaken now, so as they can be properly staffed with qualified people whose overarching interest is that of seeing to the business of getting all of the archived materials, of which there is a vast amount, into a properly-accessible, properly-searchable, and properly-organized state of affairs. What exists right now is a comically-inadequate embarrassment, not befitting the world's foremost space program, and there needs to be an accountability for things to set them right.)
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The mostly-finished ziggurat of Pad B (below and to the right of center), looking toward the southeast as the hydraulic fill pumping was still ongoing, with fresh fill slurry easily recognizable by its noticeably darker shading, which is caused by its much higher water content. Existing hydraulic fill which has had time for the water which carried it to its location to drain down into the ground beneath it is near-white in shading. In the near distance just beyond Pad B, you can see the dredge which was sucking existing sand from a shallow depth beneath the surface of the water it is floating on, mixing it with that water, and pumping the resulting slurry through lines of piping laid across open sandy ground previously created in the same manner. In the background, Pad A can be seen, also under construction, with its own ”Ziggurat” being disassembled and the ”Buried Stone Castles” which would eventually be embedded within it, in a state of active construction.
Finished ziggurat of Pad B, looking from south to north across the open, and utterly undeveloped, expanse of the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge toward the Atlantic Ocean beyond.
The ziggurat of Pad A, one last time.
The same place, viewed from very nearly the exact same angle, after disassembly of the ziggurat, which was required to lay down all that structural concrete along with the utilities infrastructure hardware which is in it, on it, and around it.
And another image, in color, taken a very short time after the one immediately above, but from a very different angle, to help you with making better sense of things, three-dimensionally.
And for those of you who have read all of this material, up to where we are now, closely, having thus gained an intimate understanding of what everything is, those two photographs immediately above, looked at slowly, closely, have the power to suddenly transport you, as you examine the myriad details depicted by them, taking you back in time to the very jobsite itself, with an eye that sees, and an ability to then gain further understanding of things, on so many different levels as to defy belief. You just sort of scan slowly across the images, savoring the details, knowing each piece of the puzzle in a way that nobody else can, and it becomes a very pleasurable experience when that clarity of vision suddenly snaps into place for you.
And to close this small section of the narrative, a view of the Pad A ziggurat, one final time, looking down the Flame Trench from north to south, showing us how the Buried Stone Castles have now been reburied, with only the exposed gash of the Flame Trench, with the split roof of the Center Castle (which of course is the Catacombs with the flatness of the Crawlerway on top of them) unburied, still visible. To the right, extending out of frame, construction of additional earthwork fill is visible, which will become Pad Access Road 'E'. (Which access road, on Pad B, by the way, constitutes the very best location on the whole pad for longboard skateboarding, to which I can attest from personal experience. The slope is moderate, and you can run straight, or switchback, all the way down to the toe of the slope at a manageable and very enjoyable speed. The surface of the road, in the early 1980's anyway, was well-maintained and smooth.)
And the structure of our Buried Stone Castle becomes the thing that supports the Crawlerway, which is the thing that permits the transport of our seventeen-and-a-half-million-pound unfuelled-rocket-sitting-on-its-motor-carriage to its final destination sitting directly on top of our Buried Stone Castle's roof (which is in fact the terminal end of the Crawlerway), where the 12.8 million pound load, (which is the total weight of the unfueled Saturn V plus the Mobile Launcher it was sitting on top of) gets set down upon its support pedestals standing up above our Buried Stone Castle's roof in similar fashion as six castle turrets, and left in place after the "motor carriage" departs in order to eventually launch the goddamned thing.
And in our second look at CE-247, we see the roof of our Buried Stone Castle winds up with a finished height of 53 feet above the level of the previously-undisturbed sea-level swamp-earth beneath it and the top (and a lot of the middle) of the ziggurat is now long gone, and our castle is hollow (of course), and that means its floor, walls, and roof had better be pretty goddamned STRONG, or otherwise the whole works will collapse under the 12.8 million pound static load its bearing, and that static load then gets added to, first when we fuel our Saturn V prior to launch, bringing the static load up to 18.3 million pounds give or take (When you dig in to this stuff, and really start researching it, you discover no end of mismatches in numbers given by different agencies on different documents at different times, and we're just kind of ballparking it here anyway, so... mind that, alright?), making your Buried Stone Castle work even harder to keep holding it all up without collapsing, and then yet again, with the addition of dynamic loads, right at the moment our static load suddenly comes alive with a fury not unlike a volcano erupting, shudders momentarily while ramping itself up to full power, attempting to pull the box up into the sky with a momentary upward force of 1.4 million pounds, followed by a tremendous rebound throughout the box and the 400 foot tall tower attached to it as the hold-down clamps release, at the moment our Saturn V detaches itself from the Earth and starts climbing into the sky with enough energy to carry it all the way to the fucking MOON...
So ok. So lets fortify our castle so as it won't come apart or fall down under those combined static and dynamic loads, and yeah, while we're at it here, we might want to fortify it a little more, 'cause if, instead of climbing into the sky, the fucking thing decides to blow itself to hell with the literal energy release of a small tactical nuke, we'd really like for our castle to still be there, in one piece, after we've removed all the wreckage caused by the explosion, and roll another goddamned Saturn V right on out there on top of our castle roof again, and take another go at it...
...and...
We're gonna need a pretty sturdy castle to account for all of that.
So here's a drawing of the whole Buried Stone Castle, shown in elevation view, S-305, done as a section cut in similar fashion as the drawing above except that this time we're looking in the opposite direction, north-to-south, and this time the section cut gets a name, "A 301 - 305", and it's showing things with much more detail, sliced, once again, along Y.1,560,750, right through the exact centerline of the launch vehicle it was originally designed and built to support, our old friend, the Saturn V.
And before we go any farther with this, let's stop and take a look at our section cut from above, in plan view, on drawing S-303, just so as we can get an even better feel for where all this crap is going on, ok?
Ok.
And our section cut through the castle that we just looked at on S-305, is near-perfect from a point-of-view point of view, but it's smaller than I'd like on the drawing, so I went ahead and extracted just that part of things and then enlarged them and made myself another image that we can use going forward from here, getting down into the finer details of this stuff.
So here's S-305 cropped in on and then enlarged.
And it's more or less impossible to sort things out in the plan view, but once we look at that elevation view close crop, then we can really start to see things, and one of the things we see, more or less immediately is that there's not just one Buried Stone Castle, but instead there's THREE of them, and the one in the middle is split right down the middle, more less turning it into TWO of 'em.
Here, look at this.
Castle Number One is the High Pressure Gas Area, Castle Number Two is the Catacombs with the Crawlerway as a roof, and Castle Number Three is the Pad Terminal Connection Room, and all three of them are completely independent of each other across a vertical east-west plane cutting through the centerline of our launch vehicle, with the only commonality between them being the thin veneer of concrete covering and connecting them on either side of the Flame Trench.
And now that you've got a pretty good feel for things, we'll go take a look at S-302, the drawing that comes just before S-303 (duh) which we just looked at for our plan view of the whole place, and S-302 depicts pretty much the same thing, except that the general layout shown in plan view is smaller, and it's smaller because they needed to put a bunch of Design Loads notes and Min. Required Soil Bearing Capacities notes on the drawing, over there on the left side, and it's those notes that we'd like to give a little bit of closer attention to right now, so... go look at 'em. Go read 'em. And we see that they're not particularly detailed (that information would be found in the specs that came with this drawing package in the Scope of Work, but alas, I do not have the specs), but they're good enough for our present purposes of trying to understand this place, and as you can see, they were dealing with some pretty substantial forces which had to be fully accounted for, complete with such margin as may have been deemed prudent at the time, when they were designing this stuff, prior to going out there and building it.
And Castles Number One and Three, the High Pressure Gas area and the Pad Terminal Connection Room, are pretty cool items in and of themselves.
The High Pressure Gas area in particular, is a place where they're dealing with some pretty energetic stuff. We met it before, back on page 41, where I was telling you about the High Pressure Gas Tower (which is sometimes called the Pneumatics Tower, because... of course it is), shown here on drawing 78K10338 sheet M-4 with highlighting for all that 6,000 psi stuff. All of that stuff comes up to the top of the Pad from down inside the High Pressure Gas area, originating in a whole slew of tanks, and when I say "high-energy" what I mean is that if one of those tanks ever lets go... well... you don't want to be anywhere remotely near a thing like that. It never happened of course, but they designed and built that part of the Pad... for just in case.
And actually the PTCR kind of packs a pretty good wallop too, 'cause that's where you'll find things like Switching Station 1001 which feeds power into Switching Station 1002, which is located inside the body of the pad, inside the PTCR, and in Switching Station 1002, power feeds through Industrial Bus 1 and Industrial Bus 2, both of which are rated at 13.8 kilovolts at 1,200 amps, out through a series of large air-gap circuit breakers into the rest of the pad, and that's a pretty good whack of electrical power, in case you were wondering. 4,000 amp trip rating ain't nothing to trifle around with, either.
And both Castles, which I'm calling numbers 1 and 3, just because I can, HPG and PTCR, were built way-strong for multiple good and sufficient reasons, including just in case there was an on-Pad blow up, but we started out on this little journey down in to the depths below by looking at what's just underneath the boot heels of our ironworkers in the photograph up at the top of this page, so let's zero in on Castle Number Two, two separated long-hallway-towers rising above one hell of a foundation slab, which have, as their twin roofs, our pair of Trackways that define the Crawlerway, split into twain by the Flame Trench running lengthwise between them.
And ordinarily I've never been very much interested in drawings of concrete and re-bar, which I've always found to be pretty tedious and boring, and somehow lacking in artistic merit too, but in this instance, I'll make an exception.
And before we go, we may as well back up one more sheet, to S-301, which is yet another plan view of the whole place, and take note of the locations of some of the section cuts we're going to be looking at on a few of the drawings I'm about to show you, which let us see exactly how the innards of this place were made, and made stout.
And we came this way before, back on Home Life Page 5, and back on Page 41 too, and here we find ourselves once again, looking at the full length of the Catacombs, this time taken from section cut A 301 - 304, and section cut B 301 - 304, both of which can be seen as elevation views of the Catacombs on drawing S-304, which is one of the original drawings from which they were built, back in the 1960's.
Pretty substantial piece of work. Not quite 600 feet in length. Over a tenth of a mile. 53 feet in total height. In structural engineering circles, you will occasionally hear people say, "When in doubt, make it stout." And so they did.
So now, with our recently improved and extended understanding of what's going on here, we can start taking closer looks at things, in order to see what they had to do, to hold that goddamned Crawlerway up (and some of the adjacent stuff too, including our Castle Turrets, which are of course the Support Pedestals for the Mobile Launcher), 50 feet above the original landscape which existed before the Pad got built.
And as we do so, let's look at that Army Corps of Engineers press release on page 3 one more time, and take note of the fact that they're describing the structure of the Pad as "cellular" in the same sentence where they're telling us that there's going to be 120,000 cubic yards of concrete in the Pad, and of course that explains the cellular construction immediately, because if it had been constructed as a solid mass, the amount of concrete required would have been enormous, enough to build a fucking dam out of, and it would have also prevented them from running any utilities around inside of it, and either one of those two conditions could easily have been a show-stopper, so... cellular.
So ok, let's look at a "cell."
We'll pick one with a little something extra to go along with it, too, and that oughtta serve just fine as a jumping-off point for our digging in with this end of things.
We'll look at where section C 301 - 310 is located on drawing S-301, and see what's going on in there.
And we're over on the east side of things, and we're up near the north end of things, and we're looking southwards through solid concrete and steel with our section-cut x-ray eyes, and our view will be taking in in one of the things they're labeling on S-301 as "L-UT SUPPORTS", and we've met this stuff before, back on Page 41, and we already know of it from our Days of Future Space Shuttle as an MLP Mount Mechanism, and this is one of the ones with a diagonal Strut on it, a Type II Mount Mechanism, and all well and good, but back on Page 41 we were only interested in the steel which projected up above the Pad Deck, and we never bothered to ask about what the hell's going on down there underneath that sonofabitch, so now's the time to dig in, and find out what the hell's going on down there underneath that sonofabitch.
Behold, Section Cut C, on S-310, taken from S-301.
And allow me please, to point your attention to a few things, sequentially, which I'll show you as highlighting on the drawing itself as we go along.
First off, how 'bout a central foundation layer of steel-reinforced concrete, 11 feet thick.
And we'll make sure it's big enough by making it 72 feet wide.
And oh, just for laughs, let's stretch that sonofabitch out to a little over 380 feet long!
That oughtta do it.
Now I'm sure you've been in large places downtown, or wherever, maybe a big sports stadium, and I'm sure there was a hell of a lot of concrete in the thing you visited, but really... eleven feet thick?
How deep is a fucking olympic-size swimming pool?
Everybody seems to want to go with olympic swimming pools when they start looking around for ways to convey substantial volumes, so ok, I'll go with the flow, and we'll do an olympic swimming pool, and we're over here in a weird country that insists in using feet and inches instead of meters, and first we have to learn that an olympic swimming pool, measured in weird-country units, is about 164 feet long by 82 feet wide, and is 9 feet 10 inches deep, and...
...go back to the drawing, give it a nice close look. How many olympic swimming pools could you subsume into this thing? Just the central part of it. Just the part that's eleven feet thick. And I guess, if you really want to, you can go ahead and include the part that's right next to it, too. The part that tapers in thickness from eleven feet on one side, down to only eight feet on the other side. How many? How many olympic swimming pools? And I'm not in a mood to spoon-feed this one to you. It's pretty simple arithmetic. You do it...
There's a LOT of concrete and reinforcing steel down there underneath this fucking Launch Pad.
Wernher von Braun and Crew were making damn good and sure this stuff stayed put, no matter what happened up aboveground with that ridiculous Saturn V they were building and planning on flying, from right here.
And this is stuff that nobody seems to know about. Nobody has any awareness, understanding, or appreciation of it at all.
And you walk around on it...
...and it never says a word to you...
...at all.
But it's been there from day one, buried out of sight, yes, but it's most very definitely there.
And we're not done. Oh no, not yet.
There's more.
We mentioned the Castle Turrets before. The LUT Support Pedestals. The Mount Mechanisms.
Well... those things need some kind of foundation, too.
And maybe by looking at the Castle Turret Foundations (there's already six of 'em for the Big Steel Box, but there's also four more, too, for the Arming Tower. The Mobile Service Structure), we can gain a little more insight, a little more of a gut feeling, as to what's really going on around here. And the southernmost LUT Support Pedestal foundations share common concrete with the northernmost Arming Tower Support Pedestals. That oughtta be something, right?
But first, let's return to LUT Support Pedestal number 1, along with its diagonal Strut 1A on S-301, which we've already encountered in elevation view on section cut 'C' on drawing S-310, 'cause we're familiar with it, and we've just learned the actual scale of this stuff, so now we'll be better equipped to properly appreciate it. Maybe.
I'm going to re-link yet again to Harry A. Balke's document which I first showed you back on Page 41 (lotta goddamned roads lead back to Page 41, eh?), which explains, among other things, the dynamic loading on the LUT Support Pedestals at the moment our insanely-energetic Saturn V comes alive.
The up-and-down of things, for whatever reasons, is much easier to understand, intuitively. The goddamned thing weighs eighteen and a third million pounds and our senses, while completely unable to properly grok such a weight, will still happily tell us, "Yes, that's gonna need some pretty substantial support, to hold it up and not collapse under the load."
But the side-to-side...
Which basically comes in two flavors, one of which is translational in the horizontal plane, and the other of which is rotational, and can not even, strictly speaking, be properly considered as "side-to-side," and there's other stuff going on too, but enough already...
That one doesn't come as easy, for some reason.
So Harry tells us in his document (which, for the love of god, please, we just read, right?) how that end of things works, but for some reason...
...I dunno.
It just doesn't want to register properly for some reason.
So ok, so we'll come at it indirectly.
We'll come at it by looking at the foundation which was required to resist this side-to-side aspect to the forces they were dealing with statically (sort of, mostly, maybe, I dunno, how windy was it that day, anyway?), and then further unleashing additional forces, very-much-dynamically, on Launch Day. And we'll be getting some of the more "straightforward" stuff, for just the vertical forces, while we're at it, ok?
So ok.
So we'll start with just the Anchor Bolt Assemblies. Just the things that ultimately receive all of the differing forces that get applied down from, to, and right on through the LUT, right on down into the Mount Mechanisms and Struts with their associated Spherical Bearings shown on 75M05120 sheet 71, and from there, farther on down into the actual foundations of the Pad and the Good Earth beneath it. Think of these Anchor Bolts as small crenellations on top of our Buried Stone Castle if you want to (absent the Mount Mechanism, of course), and you won't be too far wrong at all, if you do. And if you're of a mind to refresh yourself on the particulars of the Spherical Bearings found inside of the Mount Mechanisms (and who isn't?), head on back to Page 18, where we had to attack them as part of Column Line 7, down where it attaches to the RSS Truck Drives.
And all of those outrageous forces of tension, shear, torsion, moment of inertia, vibration, compression, you name it, ALL of it eventually comes down through these Anchor Bolt Assemblies and the very steel-reinforced concrete within which they are deeply embedded, directly and indirectly in one way or another, so...
When it doubt, make it stout.
And on drawing S-352 9066 (Volume 9, right? Pad B Civil and Structural, right? Original Apollo Giffels & Rossetti drawing packages, right? And no, I don't like this stupid confusing G&R nomenclature one little bit either), we get a proper view on that particular S-352, the 9066 one, showing us the Anchor Bolt Assemblies for our LUT Support Pedestals and the Struts that go with 'em, too.
And for some reason, they decided to make the rendering of the Strut Anchor Bolt Assembly (the one on the right side of the drawing) rotated from its actual orientation out on the Pad Deck, and all you get on S-352 9066 to tell you that, is a little note which says, "Top Of Concrete (Slopes 45° See Foundation Sheet)," which ain't a lot, but... it's there, and you'd best pay heed, lest something dire befall you, contractually.
And this shit ain't no kind of flimsy, either.
Twelve of these things. 2½" Ø by nine feet long, ASTM A354 rods, inside of 5" Ø Schedule 80 A53-62T sleeves that are tied to a 1½" thick steel ring on the bottom, and 7" Ø by 2" thick individual steel plates on top, all nice and integrated into an angle-iron framework, and the whole works is embedded into some seriously-steel-reinforced concrete and tied back to a LOT of Number 11 rebar (which is some pretty solid steel, just a trifle less than an inch and a half in diameter) all of which winds up going all the way down to ground level, and...
...this is for the small one shown over on the right-hand side of S-352 for our Type II Mount Mechanism, the one for the Strut, not the one for the main Pedestal Column.
Whoa!
The big one, the one for the Mount Mechanism Column, over on the left-hand side of the drawing, is even heavier, and here's S-352 9066 one more time, just for good measure, just so you can see how that works, and now the Anchor Bolts have become 3" Ø ASTM A354 rods, and now there's 16 of 'em, and the sleeves they're inside of have grown to 6" Ø, and the bolt circle has grown in size to 6'-10" and this stuff ain't going NOwhere, no matter what happens up there on top of that Launch Pad, be it good, be it bad, be it something that was so fucking violent that they could hear it all the way over in Orlando.
And what you've just seen with Anchor Bolts applies to Mount Mechanisms Number 1 and Number 2 (and by extension 4 and 5, too), and here's another rendering of 1 and 2 on S-306 9014, some of which should be very familiar-looking because of your recent experience with Section C on S-310, and S-306 gives it to you in plan view, also.
We'll stop here a minute for review, and take another look at the whole Pad on the original Apollo Program Giffels & Rossetti drawing, S-301 9009, with the foundations for LUT Mount Mechanisms and their Struts, which carry our Anchor Bolt Assemblies, along with the Identification Numbers for each one of them, highlighted.
And then of course you get to the foundation for LUT Mount Mechanism number 3, which is a goddamned brute.
And the reason it's such a brute is that it's twinned with Mobile Service Structure (previously known as the Arming Tower) Mount Mechanism number 7, and...
Ok, here we go.
But I'm not so sure just how far I want to go.
Not with that Mobile Service Structure, any way.
The damn thing is... troublesome.
It's neither fish nor fowl. Neither here not there. And it had a job to do, but it didn't have a job to do. And it turns out that it was equally troublesome for everybody way back when, way back when they were first designing this stuff, before any of it had made an appearance in the real world, as real objects.
Visually, it's an arresting sonofabitch.
Really gets your full and complete attention.
It was gone by the time I first showed up in the Sheffield Steel field trailer, but I have memories of seeing it as a child a few times.
I am a Child of the Space Program, and my mother and father both worked out on the Cape, and they would very occasionally hold an employee Open House, and if you had a badge (and both mom and dad did, at one time), you could pile the family into the car, and roll on out there, and one of those things in particular, held in the mid or maybe even early 1960's, middle of the hottest part of summer, for Cape Canaveral Air Force Station only, almost killed us all, because way back then, air-conditioning was NOT a standard feature on all cars, and our old dark-blue 1957 Buick station wagon didn't have any air-conditioning, and traffic was HEAVY, creeping along through the sea of palmettos out there, and the HEAT was...
...well..
...it was pretty bad sitting there cooped-up inside of that car. Rolling the windows down only seemed to make it worse, and only seemed to let even more furnace-like air inside of it, but we were stuck, walking pace, bumper-to-bumper traffic, no water, miles yet to go, no way out, and... it
...was pretty bad.
Small child's memories.
Funny things.
And the memories are fragmentary, and are certainly not to be fully trusted, but some of them are pretty damn good, and once in a great while, I get to test my decades-old memories, as with seeing the actual contract drawings which we're using throughout this narrative, all these long, oh so very long, years later, and some of those memories turn out to be wrong, but others are astoundingly accurate, down to a level of detail which does not even seem possible, so who's to know? Who's to say?
And there those memories are, sitting right there in front of me, with a mind of their own, a life of their own, a mind and a life that once was my own...
...but no longer is...
...except that it is...
...and I'll never be able to explain it.
So anyway, some of the fragments include views of the MSS through an open car window, and that goddamned thing was BIG.
And it was just as weird-looking as all holy fuck, too.
That thing was a Monster.
In more ways than one.
And now it has intruded into the narrative of my Pad B Stories, and what the fuck am I supposed to do with this thing, anyway?
It would be fun to just drop the entire set of drawing packages which they used to build it into this narrative as a link to a monster-sized pdf file, but so far, of all the the significant steel that wound up on the Pads, the MSS is by far the least represented when it comes to being able to find... damn near anything about it... anywhere.
And it's a worthy path of inquiry. Much does it contain. Much does it have to tell us. But nothing is there to be found about it, alas.
Somewhere... deep in the bowels of NASA, or perhaps someplace else equally ossified and bureaucratically stunted like the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum, there, without doubt, exist complete sets of all of it. But the fucks who possess it, the "keepers of the keys," are a bunch of insanely narrowminded idiots, terrified of ITAR considerations, convinced that North Korea and Iran will somehow get together on it, build their own Mobile Service Structure, and find a way to drop it on somebody's head.
And when you really delve into that ITAR shit, as regards idiots in charge of historical documentation, you immediately discover that none of them have actually read anything at all in 22 CFR Chapter 1 Subchapter M (hell, they wouldn't even know where to go to find the sonofabitch), none of them actually know what the fuck they're doing, none of them actually know why or why not a thing might come under the purview of ITAR in the first place, all of them fear for their miserable little jobs deeply, all of them are lazy fucks on top of all that, and in the absence of any considered evaluation of things, in the end they simply toss everything into the same steel box, screw the lid down on it as tightly as their flaccid little muscles will permit them to, and then give you a Bureaucratic Shrug and pretend they'd love to help you, but their hands are tied.
You would think that a guy like Michael J. Neufeld, or maybe one of the other parties in that conclave, would be out there banging on doors, everywhere inside the Beltway in Washington D.C. and a few places outside of it too, advocating for the just treatment of the historical artifacts, in the form of original engineering drawings for... pretty much everything directly and indirectly related to the tremendous achievements of the 1950's, 1960's, 1970's... hell... allofit, attempting to wheedle, wrangle, and buttonhole members of Congress into revisiting ITAR with an eye toward historical exclusions from the damn thing (and how the fuck is North Korea going to use 60-year-old drawings of goddamned concrete and rebar out at Kennedy Space Center against us anyway?), specifically enumerated, and maybe complete with a well-staffed office of competent technical professionals who could examine and review all of it, so that, before it's gone forever, and that dark day continues to close in on us with deliberate stealth, it could be set free, so that we might know our own history, but...
...nope.
Not gonna happen.
Fat fucking chance of a thing like that ever happening.
And these are the people who are entrusted with the preservation, curation, and dissemination of this stuff.
Hey guys, YO! Over here! I'm volunteering for work in that office of technical professionals. Here and now! By these words you read! You may have already guessed that I'm fairly well-versed with Launch Pads end of Complex 39, so... why not?
And of course the silence that returns from such a plea is so loud that it will suffocate you.
Bullshit!
Fucking bunch of bullshit is all it is, and all it will ever be.
Sigh.
So I guess I'm not going to be getting into the MSS very deeply at all with this thing, and beyond the point of sharing the knowledge that such a thing existed at one time, via oblique reference to the pitiful store of remaining photographs and documentation as yet still exists, and that the thing in question occasionally paid the Pads a visit; I shall not be able to take you.
Sigh number two.
So ok. So I'll skip right on over it, I guess.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the student to find out how that thing worked. Great topic for a research paper.
Back to the Buried Stone Castle, then, how 'bout?
Back to the twinned foundations for Mobile Launcher Mount Mechanism 3 and Mobile Service Structure Mount Mechanism 7.
Back to this thing. Pier 7, along with Pier 8 to its immediate south (Piers 9 and 10, across the Flame Trench, were very similar), as shown on S-306A 9015
41 feet wide. 45 feet long. Over 50 feet deep.
Complete with multiple sets of the kinds of Anchor Bolts we've already come to know and love, and run through with more goddamned reinforcing steel, a fair bit of which was Number 18 bar, two and a quarter inches thick, than... I don't even know.
Serious. Fucking. Business.
And I haven't marked up the drawing, and I'm not gonna, so you get to look for some of this shit yourself on it, but I will, since I'm such a nice guy, draw your attention to the lower right side of the drawing, Section 'B-B', and the "Hold Down" sitting right there in the middle of it at a specified 8 degree angle off of plumb, which the drawing is calling "AB-5".
And since we're having so much fun with this, let's mosey on over to S-354 9070 to get a proper look at it, and...
6" Ø rods, made out of some nice S.A.E 4140 steel, heat treated and tempered, with a minimum yield strength of 120 ksi, which gives each individual one of them a minimum yield strength of... these things can handle three and a third million pounds of pull without yielding? And they're 14 and a half feet long, and there's 8 of 'em, tied to a three inch thick ASTM A441 lower base plate 10 feet down there below the surface of the concrete?
Really?
Really?
Well...
I guess that oughtta do it.
I guess.
And as for the thing which was bolted to the outrageously strong fixture that was AB-5? Which thing itself, based on nothing more than guilt by association, was likely something possessed of a strength that could make your eyes water?
The MSS Hold-down Arm?
The distant moan of a cold and lonesome wind blowing across an endless expanse of desert sand is all we'll ever get.
It hasn't quite disappeared from the face of the earth, but it's getting there.
Here's a photo of it, viewed from out on the Pad Perimeter, with the MSS in mated position with a Saturn V, and the resolution of this image is dishearteningly poor, but you can just make it out, and you can see that it's disengaged from the steel it mates with on the MSS, but overall... this is all you get. Or at least this is all I've ever been able to get. Prove me wrong. Prove me incompetent. Please. Show me the path to better renderings of this thing. Show me the path to better renderings of the MSS Hold-down Arms.
And here again, two of 'em in fact, (there were a total of 4, one on each corner of the base of the MSS) in an image taken from on high, up on the MSS itself, looking down toward the ML carrying Apollo 4, sitting there on top of its brand spanking new Launch Pad.
I'd love to know more.
I'd love to share more.
With you.
But it is with a heavy heart that I must tell you I cannot.
God. DAMN. It.
Somebody call Neufeld, or maybe one of the members of his little group (They're Curators for god sakes. They're Historians for god sakes.), and tell 'em to get up off their dead ass and get moving with this shit. Send him/them a link to this page. I don't give a shit what you do, or who you call, or what they might think of me, so long as it winds up with the people who have the connections, who have the sway, getting up off of their dead asses and rescuing an entire King's Ransom of priceless engineering drawings from The Darkness of ITAR before...
Before it is all, finally, irrevocably, and irretrievably, lost.
And I'm pretty sure Neufeld don't like me, at all, so I can't do it.
And unlike everything else between the Mobile Launcher and/or Service Structure and the Pad itself, the MSS Hold-down Arm was, clearly, designed and built to deal with forces in tension only.
Nothing about any of it showed the least sign of accommodation for significant forces of compression. Or torsion, or anything else, for that matter.
Strictly tension. Significant tension.
So.
They were concerned.
They seem to have been concerned that under certain high wind loads, the goddamned MSS might TIP OVER! But maybe not. Maybe they were only concerned with it getting a little light on one side, in a high-wind condition.
That alone might have been enough to scare them into the design and fabrication of the Hold-down Arms.
The MSS had a much larger sail area than the LUT, and would have therefore seen correspondingly larger sidewise forces in a gale. Which might not have been enough to properly turn the whole goddamned thing ass-over-teacups on its own, but which instead might have been enough...
...to give it significant uplift on its windward side, trying to tip it over but not succeeding, but succeeding in redistributing its weight, with significantly less on the windward Mount Mechanisms, and significantly more on the leeward Mount Mechanisms, and while all that's going on, those forces are going to be irregular, coming and going in pulses with the gusting of the wind, vortex shedding, and other imponderables, and now the additional weight on the leeward Mount Mechanisms is being applied dynamically, in pulses, possibly at a bad harmonic, which may very well have added up to something... fairly respectable, and it might be occurring corner-to-corner, wanting to put all of that additional dynamic loading, all of that additional weight and force, on a single Mount Mechanism and its Strut, and at what point do things start to...
...fail?
And if we lose a Mount Mechanism in this gale, or hurricane, then things really do start to get bad...
...and if only I knew.
How the hell might a thing like that have worked?
Go back and look at the picture I linked to where I called it a Monster.
And then try to imagine the consequences of that whole thing... TIPPING OVER.
Or even only partially collapsing down to the Pad Deck on one corner, or one side.
And Neufeld's unhurriedly eating his lunch with a bland expression on his face while I'm over here dying.
Gah.
Also, in that same image, both of the Hold-down Arms on the east side of the Flame Trench are visible. The one on the northeast, (partially blocking our view of MSS Mount Mechanism 7), is loud and clear, and the one on the southeast is very much less so, (partially obscured by an intervening Light Pole, and itself obscuring MSS Mount Mechanism 8, which is further obscured by that white trailer that's parked on the Pad Deck up there) but it's visible enough.
And it's visible enough to see that it's shorter than the one to its north, Number 7, and then you look at the MSS itself, and you see that the mating lugs on it (What were they constructed of? How were they built? Alas, we may never know, and goddamnit Neufeld, would you fucking hurry the fuck up already???) were at different elevations for the two Hold-down Arms, and... another lost story!
Are any of you starting to get the first glimmer of an idea as to why this sort of thing enrages me as it does?
Lost.
Forfuckingever.
Our own history.
MY history.
Gone.
Ok.
Enough already.
Give it a rest, MacLaren.
Go take a pill, MacLaren.
Calm down.
Alright then, where were we?
Oh yeah, Buried Stone Castle. With a pair of Union Ironworkers standing on top of it. Which of course is what set this whole thing off in the first place.
And by now we've pretty much taken care of all the more-straightforward stuff that held everything up and kept it from crashing to the ground with an earth-shattering roar, or maybe kept it from just sort of oozing slowly down into the squelching odoriferous
mire of the swamp beneath a furnace-like sun in the becalmed suffocating humidity, to the whining serenade of a billion mosquitoes, with nothing left over to show for any of it afterwards except for a few lingering bubbles coming up and popping thickly and heavily in the slime on top of the water next to that snake over there, so now let's get into a little something that's not so straightforward, and that would be the Extensible Columns.
Which hardly anybody seems to know about at all, but which were absolutely vital, come launch day, lest our Box (with 400 fucking feet of LUT and Hammerhead Crane sitting on top of it) maybe decide to take a good run at tearing itself apart, when our Saturn V comes alive.
The Extensible Columns were not required for operations off of the Pad with the Space Shuttle, and were removed. I never laid eyes on 'em. They were already long gone by the time I got there.
But we're doing a lot of history here, which involves a lot of Saturn V, so yeah, let's see what we can find out about the physical sense of the Extensible Columns, ok?
We first met them back on Page 41, and did a fairly good job of things back then with their conceptual sense, so as of right now, you are presumed to have (yet again, and that damned thing keeps right on boomeranging back at us, and I'm just as happy as can be to let it, 'cause it's the best, and it tells the tale way better than I can) read and understood Harry A. Balke's extraordinarily informative document, which means that in this part of the narrative, we can keep our focus strictly on their physical attributes (as much as we can, anyway, knowing that much of it remains swallowed-up in the ITAR Black Hole), and leave the rest of it, the part we've already done, alone.
When not in use, they were stored upright on a pair of low frameworks, one on either side of the Flame Trench, at the far north edge of the Pad Deck, which you can see here on drawing 75M05121 sheet 94.
And when it comes to obscurity, and lack of remaining photographic historical records, the Extensible Columns are right up there at the top of the list. Digging around through what's available photographically, you quickly discover there's almost nothing. Once the bird was on the Pad with the Crawler backed out of the way (it rolled directly across where they were located so they had to be out of the way when the Crawler was up there), they got rolled into the dark gloom beneath the acreage of the ML and more or less disappeared from sight. Nobody seems to have ever been sufficiently interested in them to stop and get a picture of 'em, up there doing their (vital) job, keeping the ML from jumping around too much at Vehicle Liftoff. And when they were stowed, sitting in "plain sight" up there on the far north edge of the Pad Deck on either side of the Flame Trench, they managed to pretty much elude detection that way, too. All of the sensibly close-up views of the Pad only got taken when a Saturn V was either already sitting in Launch Position, or very close to it, and everybody wanted to see the big missile, and everybody photographed things looking from south to north, and of course anything back there on the Pad Deck behind the LUT was never going to be visible, and... lost. Somewhere good photographs of this stuff exist, but I've never been able to find any of them.
Here they are, in their brand-new bright-yellow paint job, before they got rolled up beneath the Mobile Launcher with Apollo 4 on it, which is still creeping northward, and has yet to even be placed on the Mount Mechanisms, hard-down, the very first time they ever used their new... everything, operationally. Not the best image of 'em, but whattaya gonna do?
And here they are again, the last time a Saturn V sat poised for launch, with Skylab sitting on top of the S-II instead of the S-IVB that had been there every time before, by which time NASA had lost its original enthusiasm for bright yellow paint jobs on things out at the Pad. Crummy image, again, for the purposes of seeing the Extensible Columns, but those things really did a fine job of staying out of the picture on almost all occasions. Sigh.
And as with so very very much else out here, these things were complicated.
Fucking temporary shoring that turns out to be damn near as complicated as the goddamned rocket they were launching.
And they specified the whole thing, in detail, and just as if it was as a personal gift from The Hand of Fate, we've now got the drawings!
So ok. So it can't be bad news every time, can it?
No. Once in a while, it falls your way, and when it does, you give thanks.
And we've even got the procedure for setting 'em up, to go along with those drawings, and, in fact, that procedure is spelled out on the final sheet of the series of drawings which tell us how to build our Extensible Columns, which we find on our good friend Engineering Drawing Package 75M05121, Launcher - Umbilical Towers, Mechanical And Electrical Installation, sheets 94 through 104, so let's go to 75M15121 sheet 104 first, even though it's the last of the series.
And in abundant thanks to The Hand of Fate, I am now going to resurrect the dead, and walk you (and everybody else, too) through the lost technology of an Ancient World, and show you how they did it.
And of course the first thing they had to do, when it was time to put them to work, helping to hold up and stabilize the ML on Launch Day, was to simply go fetch them from where they were stashed out in the open, over there on the north edge of the Pad Deck. And even so-simple a job as that turns out to be... not so simple, and our procedure on 75M05121 sheet 104 turns out to be more or less incomprehensible without a little additional information, so we'll start out by giving you a little more information about this stuff, in a generalized sort of way, and this will be our first proper view of one of the Extensible Columns themselves (Kinda almost looks like its own little rocket, don't it? Put a proper nose-cone on it, light the fuse, and away she goes!), the Rack they store 'em on, and the
And notice the weight in yellow highlight over there on the elevation view of the Column, while you're admiring all this crap.
50,000 pounds!
Which is a capacity figure, to be sure, and there's going to be some margin, which means the Extensible Column won't weigh quite so much as all that, but it will still be a heavy motherfucker. Plenty heavy enough, whatever its precise weight might actually be.
So.
Careful there, Lou, that thing's pretty heavy.
Which I'm sure goes a long way toward explaining the obsessive level of weird detail they spec'd out on that forklift, up to and including the fact that they refuse to even call it a forklift, and instead very carefully refer to it as a Column Handler every single time.
Not just any old forklift will do, with these things, and if you were to hook on to one of 'em with the wrong forklift... yeah, I could see that going south on you pretty damn quick, in ways both mysterious and harsh.
So ok, so it's a Column Handler. Ok, fine. Whatever.
I kind of wonder if that Column Handler's still around out there somewhere?
Fairly pricey item, I'm sure, and I would imagine it would have come in handy with a lot of other heavy stuff, and just getting it to the Pad and back from wherever it lived when it wasn't moving the Extensible Columns around (which was pretty much all of the time), was quite the little procedure in and of itself... and... my mind tends to drift down those kinds of pathways, wanting to know more about this stupid forklift than can be deemed reasonable... but no. All of that is irrevocably blocked-off to me, shrouded in the opaquely-impenetrable cloud which hides so much else of our past, and... ah well, so it must be.
Ok, forget the stupid Column Handler then. What's up with the Extensible Columns, themselves?
Pretty fascinating objects, actually.
Here's the General Arrangement view on 75M05121 sheet 95, showing us the Extensible Column as it looks in its Transport Position (unextended), and its Erected Position (extended), which they have decided to render in an orientation which is tipped over 8 inches to the side, up at its top, showing you what it looks like at its "Max Variation From Theoretical Exact Alignment," and if you're like me, you'll immediately wonder to yourself... "What the hell in the world could be going on with the 10 million pound LUT, which is a gigantic 160 foot, by 155 foot, by 25 foot steel box with a 380 foot tower on top of it, to cause it to be kicking over to the side, at all, nevermind like that?"
And of course... Saturn V... liftoff...
Disregarding which for the moment, that drawing's not the best in the world, 'cause it's sideways, and also 'cause it's incomprehensible.
So we'll turn it around so it's right side up... and that's not much of an improvement either, 'cause it's still incomprehensible.
So let's start digging in, shall we?
Here it is again on 75M05121 sheet 95, rotated to proper vertical orientation, with a few colored notes to tell you what's going on with it in a generalized sort of way, with shading of its main components when it's in "Transport" Mode (unextended), which we can then use to understand the sense and the function of the components of this thing, keeping uppermost in mind the whole time that its load bearing capacity is in the millions of pounds, and in addition to the crushingly-large size of that load, come Launch Day, that load is going to become violent, and it's going to want very much to tear this thing apart, and our Extensible Column must be sturdy enough to absorb that violence without incurring any damage as it does so.
Ok?
And now we get 75M05121 sheet 95, rotated to proper vertical orientation, one more time, and this time I've finished it off, and shaded those main components when it's in its "Extended" Mode, and it's those red Locking Wedges down there near the bottom, which bear the entirety of the ferocious loads pushing down through the Column, that keep it from collapsing when the volcano erupts and the 10 million pound Mobile Launcher begins to dance, and the whole thing is insanely strong, and it can take one hell of a beating and laugh it off, and all in all, this whole Extensible Column deal is pretty fucking cool, if you ask me.
So now, with a reasonably-good general sense overview of the Extensible Columns as a system, we can delve further into their innermost workings, and marvel at the complexity, simplicity, cunning, and just plain old brute force overpowerment of the very intimidating obstacles which were faced down with steely-eyed resolve, as evidenced in their as-built design and fabrication.
We'll work from the ground up, more or less.
75M05121 sheet 96 shows us the Column Base Plate in plan view, including all four Locking Wedge Storage Frames, and the small inverted angle-iron rails the Locking Wedge Carriages roll back and forth on, from out of the way and inside of their Frames when not being used during storage or transport, to beneath the body of the Column when emplaced for proper load-bearing work, along with the upright piece of angle-iron bolted to the Base Plate, which the Locking Wedge Travel Stops were made from. In the top-right corner of the drawing, Note 1 tells is that the Locking Wedge Screws were manually operated via 1" square open-face ratchet-wrenches with 36" long handles. This drawing also shows us in section-cut view on the left side that the Column Body (semicircle with standard double-diagonal-lines representing steel) is completely separate from the Gusset/Guide Plates (of which all four can be seen shaded with double-diagonal-lines indicating they're also made out of steel, as is pretty much the whole thing), rotated 45 degrees from vertical/horizontal orientation) and which hem it in very closely (farther up, away from the Base Plate), without properly touching it in non-load-bearing conditions, and these Gussets show up in various locations on the drawings for the Extensible Columns (you've already seen them, whether you realized it or not), and they sure as hell look like they're a fixed integral part of the Column Body, but they're not.
75M05121 sheet 97 shows us the Column Base Plate in elevation view, and it's right here where we are shown that the Base Plate is also the top half of the big Spherical Bearing at the bottom of the Column, which allows it to rock from side-to-side to a certain extent, up at its uppermost end, without incurring damage as a result. The bottom half of the Spherical Bearing (which had to be a heavy sonofabitch, being machined from an 7" thick piece of steel, over 51" in diameter), is sensibly connected to nothing at all, being strictly for compressive loads and having no tensile integrity of any kind, and it's kept from falling on your toe when they're transporting the Column by those hefty spring-loaded eye-rods bolted up through holes in the main portion of the Base Plate that they fit through, which slides around on top of it when necessary. Look close at the center of the top half of the big Spherical Bearing, and you can see there's a 2" deep by 14" diameter recess in it, and that recess takes yet another Spherical Bearing (this one is a lot smaller), which accepts the Lower Actuator Rod on the Hydraulic Cylinder that jacks the whole works up into place, shoving the main body of the Column upward far enough to allow the Locking Wedges to get rolled in there underneath it. Whew! And just to put a cherry on top, we also get to see the nice acme-threaded Leveling Screws out there on the periphery of the Base Plate, which they used for squaring things up before they fully extended the Column upwards and into the little recess on the underside of the LUT where the Hemispherical Bearing on its top end would be firmly and unmovingly pushed into its properly-aligned location, ready to dance, right along with the rest of the LUT, come Launch Day.
Moving farther up from the Base Plate, we get to 79K05121 sheet 98, which shows us the lower barrel section of the Column, with the Hydraulic Cylinder inside of it. And interestingness abounds here, too. For starters, get a load of the thickness of that piece of solid steel up there above the Hydraulic Cylinder, with the upper Spherical Bearing for the Cylinder recessed into its bottom side the same way the lower one was recessed into the top side of the Base Plate. Heavy enough iron for you? Is a fucking 10 inch thick piece of steel that's three feet in diameter going to be heavy enough for you? I'm not going to calculate the weight of that thing, though. You do it. Steel is a smidgen over a quarter pound per cubic inch, .284 pounds per cubic inch, to be precise. So ok. So do some arithmetic with it. Ignore that our disc of steel has been machined out a little bit in a few places. You're allowed to ignore stuff like that when you're just ballparking numbers. You'll be plenty close enough to get a proper feel for it. So πr2 gives us the area for our disc, and r equals 18 inches, so we're going to be working in inches for which you have very forgivingly already been given the density of steel in, and the disc is a nice even 10 inches thick, nice and easy to multiply with... so... thickness times area equals volume, and volume times density equals weight, and...
...you tell me.
Is it heavy enough?
Just a simple round piece of steel, three feet across, ten inches thick.
I'm guessing it would make a pretty good manhole cover. Nice and sturdy. Much stronger than that crummy stuff you might be getting from the Other Guys. Drive anything you want to, right across the top of it, with never a care in the world. Tanks. Battleships. LUT's. Whatever you want. This thing ain't going anywhere. Nice and sturdy.
Not sure how you'd ever get it into the trunk of your car to take it over to the jobsite, though. Not sure how the car would do with a thing like that in the trunk, either, presuming you could get it in there without dropping it, in the first place. And are we wearing our steel-toed safety construction boots today, hmm? Out on the jobsite, I often wondered at what point does the steel in a boot toe go from being your friend into being your enemy? At what point does the steel in the boot toe quit deflecting heavy objects, and starts deflecting on its own, bending and reforming in shape in the blink of an eye, until it has turned into a nice custom-fit steel vice which is now clamping down firmly on your crushed toes, preventing you from extracting what's left of them from the vice? Do we dig it out with a spoon, or if that's too big to fit, maybe a welding rod, or whatever else is laying around that will fit? Do we use a hacksaw? Do we put a cutting torch on it? Somewhere... there is an unfortunate individual who knows... through direct personal experience. Brrr.
Ok, back to work.
This is also the drawing that tells us incontrovertibly that the large upstanding Gusset/Lifting Plates on either side of the Column barrel section are in fact not connected to it at all, despite appearances to the contrary.
Far lower left of the drawing, way down there, you get a little double-bevel groove weld symbol with an arrow pointing to the bottom edge of the Gusset, which has a nice heavy horizontal line beneath it extending off in both directions, and it's not until you follow that stupid line all the way across to the right, past the concave curve of the Hydraulic Cylinder Lower Spherical Bearing, and continuing on across to where you finally pick up some telltale double-diagonal-lines indicating steel, and things are squared off over there on their far right side, and a little "4" inside of a circle with a line going to it positively identifies it as the top half of the big Column Spherical Bearing, which is also the Column Base Plate, and it's that thing that the fucked up Gusset is actually attached to (with a no-fucking-around full-penetration weld), instead of the barrel section of the Column, and yes, that really is a crummy way to give us a piece of information which is this critical, but... engineering drawings. Which are not always quite as user-friendly as we'd like, but which do always, somewhere, good luck finding the motherfucker, contain the vital pieces of information you need to build the damn thing.
Feh.
Elsewhere, we see that the lower 2'-6½" of the Gusset is notched out 3" away from the Column (and I'll leave it up to you to figure out the asshole-backwards way they chose to spec out that little 3" dimension for the depth of the notch on this drawing, too, and it's also a nastily user-unfriendly motherfucker), leaving clearance for the outer edge of the 4 inch thick (nice and heavy too, eh) End Plate which forms the bottom end of the barrel section of the Column (and which I must reiterate is not the Column Base Plate) to ride up and down in relation to the Gusset whenever the Column is extended or retracted, without hitting it, as it does so, and this is yet another proof that the Gusset is directly attached to the Column barrel section nowhere, ok? That barrel section bottom End Plate has a nice hole in the center of it, to allow the Actuator Rod on the Hydraulic Cylinder to poke through and hit its mating surface on the small Spherical Bearing that lives on top of the big Spherical Bearing. Also, that End Plate is bolted on to the bottom of the barrel section, which itself is set down into a notch in the End Plate (pretty sure none of this stuff is gonna be going anywhere they don't want it to go, either), and the reason it's bolted is 'cause the other end of the barrel section has that god-awful 10 inch thick manhole cover welded to it, and how the hell are we gonna get that goddamned Hydraulic Cylinder inside of it, anyway? I suppose we could weld it in there, for once and for all, but then that might make maintenance on the Cylinder a trifle more difficult, and all of our real loading in this system is compressive, so really it doesn't need to be put together in such a dramatic fashion, and... a bolted connection lets us take it apart if we ever have to, without destroying it in the process by using a cutting torch to do so. Little stuff. It's all little stuff. There is no big stuff. It's all little stuff. Big stuff is merely an extensive collection of... little stuff.
Up on the other end of the barrel section we see, in section-cut view, extending outwards from our ten-inch-thick manhole cover on either side of it, filled in with double-diagonal-lines running in opposite directions to tell us we're looking at two separate pieces of steel, the Lift Bracket for the Column sitting flush on top of the Handling Bracket that's welded to the top of the Gusset Plate, complete with a 12" wide cutouts for the
You may admire those brackets here on 75M05121 sheet 102, if you're so inclined, and while you're admiring sheet 102, maybe give the dimension for the length of the notch in the Gusset which gives clearance for the barrel section End Plate to slide up and down a look, while you're a it.
2'-3½", loud and clear, two separate times in fact, one for each of the two different types of Gussets they're showing, in Details C and D.
But didn't they just tell us that notch is 2'-6½" back on sheet 98?
Yes they did.
Equally loud, and equally clear, although on sheet 98 we only get it one time.
So.
Discrepancy.
Which never got picked up and corrected on the final as-built set of drawings, despite the fact that somebody, somewhere, picked it up while the Columns were still in fabrication (How could they not? One way or another, that sort of thing will force itself on you when you're down on the shop floor, and the motherfucker won't go, 'cause the goddamned dimension on the motherfucking drawing is wrong, and now we've cut this piece of steel, and we can't use it, and... god DAMN it!), because, let's face it, the damn things got built, and they clearly worked, and we've got photographs of 'em sitting out there on the Pad Deck as real objects living in the real world.
And yes, this is exactly the sort of thing that originally distinguished me as an Exceptionally Useful Weirdo to my boss, Richard Walls, way back when, when I first showed up in the Sheffield Steel field trailer as an answering machine, not knowing a fabrication shop from a fur coat, back in the spring of 1980. Somehow, in ways that I myself do not understand in the slightest, my eye gets drawn to these teeny little discrepancies lost as individual snowflakes in the vast blizzard of other details which all add up to make the engineering drawings from which a structural steel job gets fabricated and erected.
And the discrepancies, as with this one, don't even have to be on the same drawing for my eye to be drawn to them.
I consider it to be one of the gifts (there are others) I was given in exchange for my profound prosopagnosia. My profound face blindness.
Whether true or not.
I regard it as an extraordinarily good trade, and would never in my life give back any of my gifts in exchange for being able to recognize people's faces the way everybody else does.
I seem to be doing just fine even with the prosopagnosia, and the gifts are pure bonus points. Pure extra, above and beyond what everybody else got, and...
...fine with me.
And since this is so much fun, finding this kind of stuff, allow me to direct your attention to yet another discrepancy, which is also to be found on sheet 98, which wants to take you back to 75M05121 sheet 90. Which isn't even part of the series that covers the Extensible Columns anyway, and instead shows us a Type IV Mount Mechanism which can only be found inside the VAB, (and this is as good an excuse as any to let me show you one of these things, which otherwise we might not have ever crossed paths with), but it should actually be taking you to sheet 102 (nope, not gonna tell you how I deduced that one), and even when you get to sheet 102, figuring the stupid goddamned thing out ain't no giveaway, but it's there, and no, as a matter of fact, I'm not going to tell you anything else, and when you're out there in the field trailer with this stuff, you're on your own, and Real Time and Real Money are riding on the motherfucker, so... don't fuck up, ok?
And while you're admiring the Lift and Handling Brackets on sheet 102, maybe see if you can figure out how the inner circular-cutout edge of the Lift Bracket for the Column gets welded to the barrel section of the Column. It's there. But just you find it. Yet another lovely little example of how much fun it can be to make any fucking sense out of some of these drawings when you're down on the shop floor, or out at the jobsite, with a clock ticking and a hellacious overhead cost waterfalling Real Money down a hole while you desperately seek answers from officially-designated engineering contact people who may or may not have the slightest idea as to how any of it works, and who also may or may not even be there in the first place, to ask them questions.
Big Contractor Fun!
And in the interests of saving the best for last, we may now, finally, take a look at those Locking Wedges down there, holding it all up in the air, shoved hard up against the underside of the LUT, right where it's supposed to be, even as a goddamned lit Saturn V does its dead-level best to tear the whole goddamned place into small ragged pieces of scattered debris.
And we'll start with 75M05121 sheet 100, which shows us the little spring-loaded rolling Carriage Assembly that contains the actual Wedges, and lets us roll them to and fro, into position and out of position, down there beneath the barrel section of the Extensible Column when it's jacked up by the Hydraulic Cylinder, rolling on those little inverted-angle-iron rails sitting on top of the Column Base Plate as it does so. When we're not using the Wedges, they get rolled back out from underneath the Column and the little spring-loaded Carriage gets bolted safely out of harm's way, inside of its storage Frame, which is also shown on this drawing. Stuff inside of stuff, and none of the stuff is easy, and none of the stuff is simple, and all of the stuff is all stuffed up inside of each other, and visually... it's a fucking mess down there.
It's just about a confusing motherfucker, ain't it?
And although the drawing title clearly and plainly states "Locking Wedge Assembly," the actual Wedges themselves are nowhere to be seen. Or at least nowhere to be seen in any remotely useful way. They're there, but for our present purposes, they're not. So forget about 'em, ok? For the time being, ok? For now, we need to figure out what the hell this ridiculous contraption they're showing us is in the first place, and how it works in the second place.
Keep in mind that as of right now, we're working in the dim twilight up underneath the Great Skyblocking Gloom which is the underside of the LUT, Extensible Columns in place, and we have further gotten up on it with the Hydraulic Cylinder, shoving the body of the Column upwards into hard contact with the bottom side of the LUT, following which we've placed that Cylinder in locked mode so as it won't let anything unexpectedly come back down (and yes, this is a dangerous place, and this is a dangerous time), and in similar fashion as standing beneath a suspended load, we really do not want to be here, and we especially do not want our goddamned hands in there working these fucked-up Locking Wedge Assemblies, but Wernher von Braun has deemed that we must, and as when back with Wernher in The Old Country, we are good troops, and we shall follow orders and we shall get it done, whatever it may be, at whatever cost it may take, and whatever level of danger as might apply as we do so.
The Wedges are blocks of solid steel, and the goddamned things are heavy. Isn't everything around here heavy? Yes it is. Everything around here is heavy. Heavy as fuck. All of it. So we do not, and really we can not barehand those bastards into place without a little help, and our spring-loaded rolling Carriage is what provides us with that help.
The Wedges live inside of the Carriage (which itself lives inside of the Frame when it's not being used getting the Wedges underneath the Column), and among the ways it helps us, is that it holds the Wedges up above ground contact, and it has a set of wheels, and with the Wedges clear of the ground, we can give the Carriage a push, and it will roll, Wedges and all, into place, into the danger zone beneath the barrel section of the Column which is being held up by the Hydraulic Cylinder, which can never be trusted to keep it there, nor can it ever be strong enough to do the job come Launch Day, so... Locking Wedges.
And our Frame is basically a little open-sided holder for the Carriage, which itself is wide-open on its top and bottom sides, that the actual Wedges live inside of, and when it's time to go to work, we unscrew the Carriage from its holder, and roll it on in there beneath the Column End Plate, right along with its three other brethren, which means there's four of these things down there underneath the Column, all working together to hold it up, and yes, it is pretty cramped in there, thank you for asking.
The Carriage contains the thing that actually holds the Wedges, and it's on either side, and it's slung from those springs, which are adjustable, and its underside (which is the lower Wedge Block, held on either side by the thing that actually holds the Wedges), rides a specified one sixteenth of an inch above the Column Base Plate, so as things can freely roll back and forth in there.
And once we've finally got it in there, we can go after the actual Wedges themselves, and maybe get some actual goddamned work done around this place finally, and for that, let's take a peek at the drawing for just the Wedges themselves.
And here on drawing 75M05121 sheet 99, we get to finally at long last see the Wedges themselves.
Lovely. Just fucking lovely.
Does any of this stuff, make any sense?
There are times when I have to wonder.
But.
The sense is there.
All you have to do is find it.
And I'm gonna stop right here and let you people reading this know right now, that what you're doing for fun. What you're doing just to entertain yourself. Just because lookit all the cool shit they've got in this place, and they shoot goddamned Rockets to the Moon from this place, and it's all just about as fascinating as all holy hell, and tell me more mister, please...
...and if you find that you're enjoying yourself, even a tenth as much as I'm enjoying myself, and if you find that you're successfully working through every last single link, in every last single chain, of reasoning, and you find yourself understanding, the physical manifestations, of all those links and all those chains...
...well then...
...if you're not presently doing this shit for a living...
...you are most assuredly the fuck capable of doing so...
...and it pays pretty good...
...and sometimes you get to climb around on the shit they launched their Rocket to the Moon from...
...and god DAMN it, but it really don't get no cooler than that.
So.
Take note.
Of who you are.
Of what you're doing.
Of where you're doing it.
And how it might stack up against all those other fuckwits out there.
And do not undervalue yourself, ok?
Ok.
Now. Were were we?
Oh yeah. Locking Wedges.
The things themselves.
Blocks of solid steel.
The bottommost one of which (Part Number 12) is held up on either side by The Thing That Holds The Wedges, which is a pair of surprisingly-thick bolted-on sort of butterfly-looking half-inch-thick steel plates, which we see in Elevation E on the drawing, and which are helpfully labeled as Parts Number 14, and which are attached to the spring-loaded Carriage that rolls back and forth on wheels, via the quarter-inch fillet welds shown in Elevation B on sheet 100, and the Carriage takes everybody over there to a place underneath the jacked-up Extensible Column, which we're gonna be locking in place in its jacked-up position...
With our Locking Wedges.
Which there's four of, per set.
So. The Bottom Block, Part Number 12, is a more or less square flat-bottomed piece of steel, thirteen inches wide, fifteen inches front-to-back, to a very tight tolerance of .015" plus-or-minus, with kind of a house-shaped "roof" on it, highest in the middle, sloping down toward both sides, and it sits like a house sits, upright, with the "peak" of the "roof" running side-to-side in its given location down there below the other three solid blocks of steel. And all by itself, it's already far too heavy to work by hand. The finished weight of this thing is just over 220 pounds! Nevermind the weight of the original piece of steel it got machined down from. No, you're not going to be barehanding that thing around on the bench in any way, shape, or form. But it's small. It's too small to work using the overhead bridge crane on the shop floor, so you're going to be using one of the rolling jib hoists down there somewhere, and it's going to be moving around from tool to tool as it gets made. And it's going to be "bench high" while all that goes on, and... this stuff is going to be a HUGE pain in the ass just to simply maneuver around in the shop, just trying to fabricate it, and keep that uppermost in mind as we proceed with things here, ok? It's all a bunch of weird shit. It's all a bunch of awkward, fussy, close-tolerance, heavy-like-a-motherfucker, weird shit. And it's your job, Mister Machinist Guy, to not slip up anywhere, and to not let anything happen along the way.
The Top Block, Part Number 11, mimics the Bottom Block, tight-tolerance and all, except that it's "upside-down," flat on top, with the peak of its "roof" facing downward, mirroring the orientation of the Bottom Block. But its wider (which means it's gonna be a little heavier, too), being fourteen inches wide instead of thirteen. More on this in a bit.
In the middle, there's a pair of flat blocks with angle-cut beveled sides top and bottom, Parts Number 9 and 10, more or less standing on "edge," mirroring each other flat-face-to-flat-face, and they both are just the barest whisker less wide than the Bottom Block, and the drawing specifies that width to our same very high degree of accuracy at a most-unusual-looking 12.939 ± .015 inches. Hmm... Additionally, there's an acme-threaded hole that runs horizontally all the way through this pair of "Middle" Wedges, drilled dead-center down through the middle of their flat faces, which takes a large and strangely-threaded "Screw" (that's what they call it, but it's a bit on the robust side to be calling it a simple "screw" and it's really more of a jacking screw, but we'll let that go for now). I have yet to find the diameter of this goddamned Screw on these drawings, and I've got a feeling it might be buried in the specifications somewhere, and of course I do not have the stupid specs, and I'll just guess/scale the diameter of that thing at a very respectable and strong 4 inches.
And the weirdest thing about that Screw is that it's threaded in opposite directions, on each end, and the opposing threads meet right in the middle of it, one side right-hand thread (on the end that faces toward the center of the Column), the other side left-hand thread (on the end facing outward, where you're gonna be putting your wrench on it). Never seen anything quite like it in my life. Would make a hell of a paperweight. Great little conversation-starter sitting there on your desk just like any other trinket or knickknack, although it's a foot and a half long, including the protruding end of it where you put your wrench on it, and that's maybe a little big for a standard office desk, but who knows? Hopefully, somebody grabbed a couple of these things when the Program was canceled. It pleases me to think one (or more) of these things survived, and lives on to this very day in someone's otherwise completely-anonymous Florida tract home somewhere.
So.
When you're still down there on the shop floor, still making this thing, you take one of the Middle Wedges (which are fussy beyond imagining in too many ways to enumerate here, and have edges that will get you, and no, you do not scuff the high-gloss finish, and no, you do not bang them into anything, and no, you for sure as hell do not let one get away from you and fall on your foot) and you run it down on the Screw till it reaches the place where the threads reverse, and you stop right there (couldn't go any further even if you wanted to, but let's not jam the threads here, ok?). Then you take your other Middle Wedge (which is a mirror image of the first Middle Wedge you grabbed, including being opposite-threaded through its hole, please note), and you spin it down onto the Screw until it too reaches the place where the threads reverse, and if things went well, the two Middle Wedges will come into smooth even face-to-face contact with one another at the same time their square external outlines are evenly-aligned so as it will all properly sit down on top of the Bottom Block and fit underneath the Top Block into the rest of The Thing That Holds The Wedges, and from that starting position, you can turn the Screw while restraining the Wedges from turning right along with it.
And one of two things will happen, depending on which way you turn the Screw. If you chose poorly and turned toward the right, the Screw will immediately bind, and nothing goes anywhere. If you chose well and turned left, the Screw merrily spins around, and as it does so, the two Middle Wedges will, as if by magic, start separating from one another, marching in lockstep together, getting farther and farther apart with each turn of the Screw. Be careful not to spin the stupid Screw too much, 'cause if you do, both Middle Wedges will walk right off the end of the damn thing, and you'll have to start all over from scratch, getting them back on the Screw, all nice and aligned up together. Turn the Screw the other way, and Hey Presto! back together they come.
And by now, with all four Wedges lumped together in there along with the Screw, this thing is really starting to get heavy (just this part of things alone, without considering any of the rest of the Carriage, now weighs right around 750 pounds!, even though it would easily fit down in your laundry basket, with literal room to spare), and it's awkward, and pieces of it can unexpectedly go places on you if you're not careful.
Pain in the ass getting it set up, but once it's set up, it becomes simplicity itself to deal with (excepting it's a heavy bastard, and it's a major fucking bitch to move it around anywhere).
Look at the drawing, and you can see that the two Middle Wedges are held inside of The Thing That Holds The Wedges with a tiny bit of room to spare in a way that gives them the freedom they need to walk back and forth, along the threaded length of the Screw (neatly explaining that weirdo 12.939 ± .015 inch width that got called out), held up and kept centered by the house-roof top of the Bottom Block, the ridgeline of which splits the distance between them cleanly in half, while they're being kept from turning with the Screw and fouling everything up in so doing by the two Part Number 14's, The Thing That Holds The Wedges, which are the butterfly-looking plates on either side, along with their own dead weight pushing down on Part 12, exactly the way we just talked about it.
The Top Block just kind of lays on top of the two Middle Wedges between the two Part Number 14's while all that's going on, happily mirroring the Bottom Block without need for any additional instructions or encouragement, and just in case it takes a notion to go somewhere anyway, that's not gonna happen, 'cause it's got shallow slots, one half inch by three inches, cut into its sides, right in the middle, centered on the ridgeline of its "house roof", and those slots fit cleanly and evenly over the half-inch-thick "noses" of the "butterflies" which is our two Part Number 14's of course, one on either side of course, The Thing That Holds The Wedges of course, (thus explaining why our Top Block, Part Number 11, is one inch wider than the Bottom Block, Part Number 12), and up and down it happily goes, but side-to-side it shall not go, and it can't fall all the way down, 'cause at some point it hits the butterfly's wings and that's the end of that, and... yeah.
Meanwhile, the Top and Bottom Blocks, having their house-roof-looking angled surfaces facing one another, have those angled "house roof" surfaces in flush contact with the matching angled edges of the Middle Wedges sitting in between them. And all of the the angled surfaces on all of the Blocks and Wedges are smooth as silk, and they all fit together flush, snug, and smooth, and somebody even came along and specified lubrication and protective finishes for 'em, so they can slide across each other nice and easy whenever they need to.
The whole apparatus, Top and Bottom Blocks, with Middle Wedges in between them, now constitutes a very curiously-shaped bearing, and by now, we know all about bearings...
...so now what?
Stuff it all up underneath the Column, that's what!
With the Middle Wedges backed out to the far ends of the Screw, the Top and Bottom Blocks can nestle down between them a little farther, causing them to be closer to one another, thus lowering the overall height of our gizmo, and the whole thing now has plenty of room above it and beneath it to fit.
Ok.
Now turn that goddamned Screw!
And watch in amazement as the Top and Bottom Blocks start to separate from each other, being squeezed out from between the narrowing space that's disappearing between the two Middle Wedges as they continue to close in on each other with each turn of the Screw.
As the Middle Wedges close in with one another, they're walking up the "house roof" of the Bottom Block, getting higher and higher as they do so, and the Top Block is getting squeezed out from between them, so it's getting higher and higher at twice the rate, and it's now pushing right on past the level of the top of the Carriage, which is wide open on top for just this purpose of allowing that Top Block to keep right on getting higher and higher as things proceed.
The whole thing has become very much alive, and the Screw we're turning to make it all happen is rising right along with the Middle Wedges as they continue to close in on one another..
...until the Top Block makes hard contact with the bottom of the Column barrel section End Plate, and as we continue turning the Screw, the spring-loading of the Carriage very graciously permits the Bottom Block to move downward, until it too is in hard contact, with the Column Base Plate.
At which point we give it some extra oomph using that thirty-six inch long handle on the ratchet wrench they specifically told us to furnish for this express purpose, in General Note 1, back on sheet 96 when we were admiring the Column Base Plate.
Give it all a good looking over to make sure it's right, and then back off with the Hydraulic Cylinder and get the hell out of here. You're done.
Tra la la.
How fucking cool is all of that?
And now, none of this shit ain't going nowhere, not even when the volcano erupts and the fucking LUT dances a happy little Moon Rocket Jig when it does so. Those goddamned Wedges are wedged. For good and for real, for true and for honest.
Once the Moon Rocket's gone, come back in here, give the Hydraulic Cylinder the juice, back off with the Locking Wedges, roll 'em into their little open-frame storage deal right there on the Column Base plate next to 'em, let down with the Hydraulic Cylinder until the Column Lift and Handling Brackets come into hard contact with each other, pick it all up with the
Read all about it on sheet 104, one more time, and now that you know what's going on, those instructions will make perfect sense, and as a special bonus, down there in the lower left of that drawing, they even give you some helpful hints for how to make the goddamned Middle Wedges, and show you how it all fits together when you do it right.
What a great bunch of guys!
And this is the way the Ancient Astronauts went to the fucking MOON!
And it has been my signal pleasure to have been chosen by the Hand of Fate to be the one. To be the one who got to resurrect this long-dead stuff. To be the one who brought it back to life!
And to be lucky beyond all imagining, and get to share it with you.
So.
By now, we've gotten ourselves a really good feel for things with our Castle's foundations, and walls, and turrets, so let us now proceed to the Roof, the Crawlerway itself, which John and James are standing on in our photograph, and which we now know to be utterly hollow for a distance of nearly 50 feet beneath their feet.
And we've learned that once everything was properly parked where it was supposed to be parked, the Mount Mechanisms, along with their ever-so-robust foundations, would be carrying the load, leaving the Roof completely out of things.
But until we actually set down on those Mount Mechanisms, while we were borne by the Crawler, either in motion or sitting still, held up by its jacks so as the ML/MLP was not in full bearing contact with the Mount Mechanisms, it was the Roof of the Castle directly beneath the Crawler Treads, which would be carrying the load, tasked with making sure the whole works, Crawler, Box, Tower, Saturn V, and all, did not suddenly take a fifty-foot fall... which would certainly qualify as a Bad Thing.
So.
We'll slice a section cut at elevation 27'-0" all the way across the entire raised area of the Pad containing any concrete running vertically through it, and we'll shade the area that will be seeing the loads as the Crawler moves across it, excluding those additional areas on either side which constitute the Foundation Piers for the LUT and the MSS. These are the Catacomb Cells, and they're what holds it all up when the Crawler is bearing the load. And you get to see that here on drawing 79K10338 sheet V-12. In this drawing, you get to see the large "doorway" Cutouts in the Cell Walls, but you're high enough to get you above the Foundation down there at ground level, and in this way all of the load-bearing walls, for pretty much the whole place, stand out in sharp relief against a background empty of all other details.
In this section-cut plan view at elevation 27'-0", the open "doorways" make it look pretty weak across the full length of the Catacombs, but we've already seen what's actually going on with those Openings, and there's a hell of a lot of reinforced concrete above them, and the strength is there, and that's all that matters, in the end. This drawing, by the way, being cut at an elevation of 27'-0", misleads about those open Cutouts in the Cell Walls, because at that elevation, those Cutouts do not exist, and I'm guessing they just sort of dropped 'em in there on this section cut through 27'-0", to let you know they're there, and when you're dealing with load-bearing walls, stuff like that is pretty fucking important, but still... And we know all of this because we've already been here before, much further up on this Page, back when we were first getting introduced to our Buried Stone Castle, when we looked at Section Cut C, on S-310 9020 , which plainly tells us the Cutout openings are 10'-0" tall, which only takes them up to elevation 20'-0" or thereabouts, so at 27'-0"... no Cutouts, ok?
The actual CrawlerWAY, did not cover the entire Roof of the Castle, and instead was narrower, and offset some, toward the Flame Trench. We have to be able to get the damn Crawler past all that Mount Mechanism Foundation jazz, right?
So they pinched it a little.
And here, on Sheet S-301 9009 of original Project Apollo 1964 Pad-B as-built drawings, Launch Pad General Plan, which shows us the Pad Deck, we get to see exactly where the Crawlerway Trackways extended across the Pad, and I dropped a to-scale overlay of the Crawler in-transit, on there, too. Give all the Foundations and Numbered Mount Mechanisms and Extensible Columns a look while you're at it, and you can immediately see why the Extensible Columns had to be removable, and you can also see how close they're cutting it with clearance between the outboard edges of the Crawler Treads and the inboard edges of the Mount Mechanism Foundations. It's a giant place, but everything is cut just as close as they could cut it, which means there's not really any room, for anything, up there. Also, on this drawing of the Pad Deck, they're giving us the Catacomb Cell Walls in dashed line to let us know where they are, but they're no longer showing us the Cutouts, which is ok, since we already know they're there and we also know exactly where they are.
And you click in on that drawing to get it to render full size, and one of the things that kinda jumps right out at you, which you may or may not have ever given any gut-feeling consideration before, is... the Driver, who's steering the Crawler, doesn't really have anywhere to go! You're trundling along, all seventeen and a half some-odd million pounds of you, and your margin on either side is... INCHES!
I wonder what kind of driving test those folks have to pass, before they let 'em carry their first load?
Yeeks!
Keep the Rocket Side up, every chance you get, ok?
The Crawlerway was curiously-constructed across the steel-reinforced concrete Roof of the Castle, which was hollow down there underneath it of course, and extending down the Pad Slope for a pretty good ways, where the solid fill of the Ziggurat was underneath it, too, and I've highlighted S-301 9009 a different way to let you see the location of that particular area, the 'curiously-constructed' part, and it's not exactly the same area that I highlighted for the Trackways. Up on top of the Pad Deck, it's all one thing, and both Trackways on either side of the Flame Trench are merged together, laying on top of one single "Panel", whatever that whole "Panel" deal might even mean, but once you get off the Pad Deck, and start down the Pad Slope, the "Panels" are split, in exact agreement with the Trackways. Which is a little weird looking, if you ask me. On the drawing, they were careful to enclose the entire "Panel" area in its own set of lines, and then they went to the further trouble to fill it in some with the vertical/horizontal cross-hatching that indicates steel-bar grating, on either end of it, to indicate the fact that it's not just plain old steel-reinforced concrete in there, but instead, there's a little more going on with it than that.
S-345 9059 gives us a nice plan view and section-cut elevation view of this whole area extending down the uppermost portions of the Pad Slope, and it clearly tells us there's 178'-0" of "Steel Grid," sitting on top of a "Conc. Slab," beginning at the south face of the very last Catacomb Cell, right where the Piping Tunnel runs beneath the Pad Deck, with the uppermost part of the Flame Trench Slope bisecting the Crawlerway up there (and yeah, I did my best with the distortions in the original drawing as I received it, but at some point, I had to let it go, so it's not perfectly square in the areas where stuff is being shown, nevermind the areas of the drawing border, and a lot of these Giffels & Rossetti drawings are... pretty fucked up, distortion-wise, so... we do the best we can, ok?). That 178'-0" run of special Crawlerway extends all the way down past the Engine Service Kart Power Pit, which is what you see me standing on top of in the photograph that leads Page 50, which is what leads this whole Part 2 portion of the Pad B Stories. Also, this whole area is surprisingly busy, with a lot of shit going on that you'd never expect to be seeing in something so "simple" and maybe get a load of that triangular concrete buttressing there, sitting against the south face of the last Catacomb Cell with the Piping Tunnel in there down at its bottom, extending out underground into the solid fill of the Ziggurat, to meet the tip end of the Foundation Slab. They wanted it STRONG. So ok. So they built it strong.
Once again, S-310 9020 Flame Trench Cells Sections & Details (which is really a good drawing, and shows a million neato things in a clear and easy-enough-to-understand fashion) is the tip-off, and I've marked it up to let you see that. But clearly, it's not enough. In fact, had I not specifically drawn your attention to the blue-highlighted area of the Grating Panel, you would have never noticed (well... maybe one of you did). You would have never said to yourself, "Hey, there's something funny about that. Something's different in there. What is that? Why'd they do that?"
And as to that "why" part, I'm really not quite sure, myself.
Let's head on over to S-351 like they're telling us to. Maybe something over there might help us some.
And right off the bat, it gets hairy.
And here it is, S-351 9065, Launch Pad Crawlerway Grid Slab Sections & Details, unmarked, and you look at it, and at first, yeah, ok, another engineering drawing, and yeah, ok, it's maybe a little tricky here and there, but it's the usual stuff, and... what's the big deal?
And you start actually looking at it, and at some point, you begin to realize, "This thing doesn't make any fucking sense at all. Anywhere."
Fucking Giffels & Rossetti. What's up with them assholes, anyway?
Back on S-310, Flame Trench Cells Sections & Details, they proved they could do it right. They proved they could get it done, clearly and concisely, accurately and understandably, but it's like they were just playing a little game with us when they did it.
"Ha Ha, see? We can do it if we want to. But we don't want to!"
HAHAHAHAHAHA joke's on you!
The assholes.
Oh well.
But before we go any farther with it, could you have ever imagined that the stupid Crawlerway, which is nothing more than a glorified concrete roadway, up on top of the Pad, could be so goddamned complicated? Could be so goddamned busy?
Look at that thing! What in the name of hell IS all that stuff in there?
Holy shit!
I never suspected the least of it. Ever.
Yeah, ok, you're walking around on it, or standing on it like John and James in our photograph, and there's a kind of a grid steel thing going on in the concrete down there underneath their boots...
...but holy shit, what in HELL is all that other stuff in there?
Well... yet again, let's dig in, shall we?
And to understand S-351 we have to back up to S-310 to see what it's showing us, and ok, cross-section (Section "C 301 - 310" to be precise), and there's some Mount Mechanism Foundation stuff in there, but we have to back up again, this time to S-301, to get our bearings on exactly where that cross-section view on S-310 is being cut, and S-301 gives us the answer, crisp and clean, as being the far north end of those oddball Crawlerway Panels, and in particular, the selfsame Panels with that vertical/horizontal cross-hatching telling us... grating of some kind, just north of the northernmost Mount Mechanism over on the east side of the Flame Trench, good old Mount Mechanism Number 1, which is a Type II, and don'tcha just love all of the steps involved to get there, and all of the daffy numbering systems they use while they're doing it?
Of course you do.
So ok, so we're definitely looking at one of those Panels, one of the ones that has some kind of grating in it somehow, on S-351, so... now what?
Dig we must, so... where's my shovel?
And when we return to the scene of the crime on S-351 with our shovel, of course we can use our shovel to dig, but we can also use it to simply beat on things, too. And of course that's pretty damn satisfying, sometimes. Just simply bludgeoning things with a shovel, every once in a while.
And on S-351, we get Detail 'A', which is cut from, referred from, taken from... nowhere at all, sigh, and which is looking down on the Crawlerway Panel in plan view, from above, and they even go so far as to provide us with a nice 27'-0" dimension line, complete with the world "Crawlerway" attached to it, to let us know, yep, that's the Crawlerway you're looking at right there, no doubt about it, but it looks to me as if the Crawlerway Panel is kind of two different things, side-by-side (but depicted one above the other on this shit-ass drawing... arrrggghhhh), one east, one west, and when delving in to that bit of Giffels & Rossetti Deviousness, it turns out that... no.
That's not what's going on here at all.
And of course Giffels & Rossetti are laughing their asses off at us, because, "How stupid can you be?"
Obviously that's not what's going on here at all, and all you had to do was look at the "TOP CHORD PLAN" and "BOTTOM CHORD PLAN" notations over there, in plain sight, and see that both of the two very different things we're showing you here are not side-by-side at all, and instead, they live as two layers, one layer sitting directly on top of the other layer, like layers in a cake, maybe, and the whole Crawlerway Panel is made out of this stuff, both shown sides, Top Chord and Bottom Chord, stacked one on top of the other everywhere, along the full width of these Panels as they extend across the full length of the Crawlerway as it extends across the fucking Roof of the fucking Castle! So. Have'ya a little Crawlerway Layer Cake why don'tcha? Um... yummy Crawlerway Layer Cake.
Oh. Ok. Gee whiz. Thanks guys, for making that one so simple and so clear and so easy to understand. What a bunch of swell guys you are, you Giffels, and you Rossetti, too.
And here's S-351 9065 colored in to let you see what the devious sonofabitches did here.
Lovely. Just fucking lovely.
But at least now we can see what the miserable bastards did, so fuckem. Although... can you imagine the fun they had putting the Bid Package together for this thing? And the NASA guy ain't saying shit. Ain't helping at all. The NASA guy has clammed up completely, and if he never does anything else in his life, one thing he is going to do, is to NOT let it wind up being his tit caught in the wringer with this thing, and you can bet your life on it. So. "Ok Lou, are you sure you've got it costed-up correctly? Are you really really sure you've got all of the material, and all of the labor-cost for this nightmare fucking thing accounted for in our bid package? Are you reaaaalllllly sure, Lou? 'Cause if you fuck this one up, we're all going to go bankrupt, and we're all going to be eating beans out of a can for the rest of our lives, and... are you really-o truly-o SURE?" Yeah, that one had to be no end of jolly fun, sweating over these horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE drawings laid out on a table in your office with your boss breathing down your neck while you try to make sense out of 'em.
Fuck. That. Noise.
So ok. So now that we know what we're looking at, let's look at it, ok?
And holy mackarolly is it ever some elaborately-sturdy stuff!
And I guess that if you were rolling seventeen and a half millions pounds across me every once in a while, and I was hollow down there underneath me, yeah... I'd kinda want to be sturdy, too.
But don't forget, all of this stuff is laying directly on top of the concrete Roof of the Castle, which is already 2'-9" thick, and absolutely riddled with one hell of a lot of closely-spaced #8 and #10 rebar. Which I would imagine, might have a little structural integrity of its own, before anybody ever shows up with any Grating Panels to lay down on top of it.
Strong strong strong, everywhere you look, strong.
So ok. So now that we have a sense of how the Layer Cake is arranged, generally, let's look close, and see how they made the layers.
And they didn't scrimp on ingredients, that's for sure.
S-351 shows it to us, but it's pretty complicated, so I'm going to progressively mark up 3-351, item by item, to make it easy enough to see what's going on with it, ok?
And we'll kind of work from low to high, 'cause that's how they would have had to build it, and... damn, but there's a lot of shit in there.
First, the Bottom Layer of the Layer Cake, ok?
Make the bottom of your Cake Pan out of ⅜" steel plate, and we drill 2" Ø holes in it, 2'-0" on center, in all directions, and we'll get to the reason for that little item later on here, ok? Make the sides of your Cake Pan out of the same ⅜" steel plate, except where one Grid Panel abuts another one, where you use heavier ½" steel plate instead, and because of the exigencies of how it's attached to the rest of the Pad, you get to connect those ½" "sidewall" plates together with a ¼" Gap Weld, literally welding an empty space together and filling up a ¼" gap between the upper and lower parts of the ½" "sidewall" plates with weld material (we're not gonna be letting the apprentice be doing any of this work, you can rest assured), and... we wish we could have done it a bit more elegantly, but... ah well, so it must be. It ain't pretty, but it'll be strong enough (along with everything else in here helping it, of course), so it's ok.
Then we line the top side of the bottom of the Cake Pan with ⅜" plates, 9⅝" high, edge-up across the full width of the Crawlerway, 2'-0" on-center, everywhere, and these will help hold up the Top Layer, but let's leave that be for now, ok? In addition to those guys, we also weld down 1" plates, 3" wide, 1'-2⅝" tall, with a hole up near their top edge that takes a "Ring Bar" and no, we're not gonna discuss that one right now either, ok? We'll get back to it, but not now, not yet. Then, once all that's done, we lay 3" x ⅜" bars, edge-up, on 0'-6" centers, everywhere across the top surface of the bottom of the Cake Pan, for the full length of the Crawlerway, everywhere these Grid Panels are found up on the Pad Deck. Then, after that, we lay 1¼" x ¼" bars edge-up (and these bars are the identical size as the Bearing Bars for the Steel Bar Grating that covers all of the platforms, catwalks, and everything else on both towers that we've been walking across the whole time) also on 0'-6" centers, running crosswise to the larger and heavier ones we just put down, covering the top surface of the bottom of the Cake Pan, and all of that is cut, fit, and welded together, and... that's one hell of a lot of fussy time-consuming work to do, making these goddamned things. And remember, this is just the Bottom Chord only. Nothing else.
And when it's done it looks a lot like the way I've marked up our good friend S-351 9065 in Detail 1 and Detail 2 on the top right part of the drawing, to let you see all of this Bottom Chord stuff, in as isolated a form as I could reasonably be expected to make it.
And... did I not warn you that it's... complicated?
Yes I did.
But you're good for this. You've got this. So let's do that Top Layer of the Layer Cake now, how 'bout?
And it wastes zero time... before it gets... weird.
They're 5" deep. They come in at a (surprisingly-light) specified weight of 6.38 pounds per running foot. They extend north/south for the full length of the Crawlerway up here on top of the Pad. They cover the full breadth of the Crawlerway up here, pretty closely-spaced at 6" apart from one another, on center.
And there's more...
They have a cross-sectional area of 1.8702 square inches. They have a specified Moment of Inertia along their 'X' Axis of 6.5822 inches to the fourth power. The have an Elastic Modulus at their extreme bottom fiber of 2.930 inches to the third power. And they have an Elastic Modulus at their extreme top fiber of 2.406 inches to the third power, and that's a trifle lower than their Elastic Modulus down at their extreme bottom fiber, which means they're a little stiffer up top, a little less inclined to change their shape up top, under the same amount of stress (say, maybe when something that weighs seventeen and a half million pounds comes rolling along, across the tops of them... hmm?). And oh yeah, they're made out of common A36 mild steel just like damn near everything else up here is made out of...
But what in the name of all holy fuck ARE they?
They're not Wide Flanges... and they're not S-Shapes... or any of the other, less-common, nominal rolled shapes... and they're not Rails... and...
I can't find 'em anywhere!
And believe me, I've looked.
Not only are they not in any of my Steel Books, they're not even in my 2002 copy of the AISC Rehabilitation and Retrofit Guide, and some of the stuff in that thing will take you all the way back to the late 1800's(!) fer chrissakes, and if they're not in that thing, then I have no fucking idea where they are, and I've just about decided that they're nowhere, and for whatever bizarre reasons (something along the lines of "Alright now Lou, let's not go dropping that Saturn V fifty feet down a hole, ok?" might do, though) these things were spec'd out for a special one-off roll at whatever steel mill it was that made 'em, and the mill tacked on the additional charges (which I would imagine were significant) for all the work and annoyance of setting it all up special, and once rolled, they broke it all down and reconfigured their hot-rolling gear right back to something a little more normal, and went on their merry way with rolling steel shapes for customers who were perhaps just a little bit less fussy about things, but that's purest guesswork, and really, I have no fucking idea what these things are, or where they came from, or who made 'em, or why, or how, or any of it.
Now stop.
Stop a minute and try to put yourself into the estimator's shoes with this one. How in fuck do you cost these things without either bankrupting the whole company with a catastrophic underbid, or blowing the total cost of the Bid Package sky-high to a point where you know for a fact that you'll never be the low bidder, and you'll never get the job as a result? Overbid the goddamned thing enough times and the company will go just as bankrupt as it would if you'd catastrophically underbid the motherfucker. It's a fine line, and you're working without a net, and they don't grade on a curve, and every child is not a winner.
My boss, Dick Walls, did this stuff for his whole life.
My boss, Dick Walls, had severe stomach ulcers from the accumulated stress of doing this stuff year after year after year. Almost killed him a couple of times with sudden-onset internal bleeding. Heavy shit, right there, ok?
I lasted just about ten years with it, the first half of which I was the Village Idiot and not allowed near any of the financials that drive this stuff, and then business out on the Cape slowed way down, and I got laid off, and I could not get back out there again, no matter how hard I tried, and it was hard like a motherfucker to lose it all and still have to keep putting one foot in front of another and keep pushing on, through gritted teeth, and any of you who have endured such a thing know, and about all I can say for the rest of you is that I sincerely hope and pray that you never learn just how hard it really is.
But then, creepingly, slowly, over a period of about five years, an in-depth realization set in and cured up, strong, resilient, and after enough time had passed following the extremely-violent strike up side my head with an extraordinarily high-energy clue-by-four, it dawned on me that it was the luckiest thing that could have ever happened to me, and now, all these years later, I'm an Old Man and yet I'm still healthy enough to go surfing (Try it some time, maybe. Try it and see just what a murderous full-aerobic workout it really is.) whenever the waves get nice and clean.
And I remain fully and completely convinced that final lay-off and subsequent inability to get back on is what Saved My Life (and also improved it immeasurably as well). For literal and for true. No exaggeration here of any kind. And if that doesn't make sense to you, that's just fine with me, and I'm not here to proselytize or evangelize about it to the slightest degree. Make of it what you will, but I'm pretty damn sure that I'd have already been dead by now, had I managed to stay in the business like I (stupidly) wanted to.
I miss being able to tromp around on fucking Launch Pads. I miss being able to lay hands on the flight hardware. But I do NOT miss the business. Never again. Not for all the money in the world would I ever again immerse myself in the business. It's slow poison, it accumulates over time, it's horrifyingly corrosive, it turns people into grasping, acquisitive, cold-hearted monsters who would sell their own mother's soul to the devil and then pat themselves on the back for negotiating and striking such a favorable deal, and it kills, and I harbor no illusions about any of it. So... thanks, but no thanks.
So.
Consider that.
Ok.
Whatever these things are, they're here and it's now and by god we're using 'em!
So ok, so back to the fucked-up Top Layer in the Layer Cake.
Take the goddamned 5" I-Beam whatevertheyare's, and lay 'em down crosswise on top of the 9⅝" x ⅜" plates we welded edge-up to the top side of the bottom of the Cake Pan, 6" on-center, and be done with it.
Then we get the ¾" Ø bar, cut it into a zillion pieces, and fit it between our Mystery I-Beams down low against their webs, everywhere, 8" center to center, just above their bottom flanges.
After that, comes the 1" Ø bar, same deal with cutting it into a zillion pieces, and fitting it between the Mystery I-Beams everywhere, also 8" center to center, but this time it goes against their webs high, just beneath their top flanges.
And now, 2" x ⅜" flat bars, edge-up, with their tops even with the tops of the Mystery I-Beams, cut and fit around the contours of their top flanges and upper web (and yes, that is quite the tricky little curve to be cutting into each and every piece of that 2" x ⅜" flat bar).
And then, as a bit of icing on this Layer of the Cake, in four places, outboardish (you can use the plan view of the panels to get your locations), on every 13'-5¼" by 7'-11½" Panel, we'll interrupt the 2" x ⅜" flat bars and the 1" Ø bars (but not the ¾" Ø bars, 'cause they're down low, out of the way), and insert ourselves a little low place, 2" beneath the surface, lined on its bottom with a ¼" thick plate, 7⅝" by 5 and thirteen sixteenths inches, slotted to fit down over those 1" x 3" bars standing way up to the very top of the Layer Cake, the ones with the holes in 'em, and the holes take a ⅞" Ring Bar...
Allofit cut. Allofit fit. Allofit welded.
Good lord, is this enough?
Yes, it's enough. I suppose. For now, anyway. But there's more coming, so don't go away, alright?
And fitted and welded and tra la la, and you wind up with your Top Layer in the Layer Cake, and when you're done with it, it looks a lot like the way I've marked up our best friend S-351 9065 in Detail 1 and Detail 2 with still MORE pretty colors.
So.
Enough already! Alright already! May we please haul these things from the fab shop out to the job site, and lay them down on the fucking Pad Deck and get to work?!?
No.
We may not.
'Cause everything we just did only constitutes the Panels, and before the goddamned Panels can go anywhere, the Roof of the Castle needs to be made ready, and that's no walk in the fucking park, either.
Turns out that the Layer Cake of the Panels is just the Top Layer of another Layer Cake.
Dear god!
Where does it end?
Don't ask!
Further!
Back when they were laying the concrete Roof on top of the Castle, they knew what was coming, and built accordingly.
Keep in mind that, as per S-310 9020 Flame Trench Cells Sections & Details, the level expanse of the Castle Roof above the hollowness of the Catacombs is 2'-9" thick, but that's not quite enough, and our Roof is going to need a Parapet along its Flame Trench side (and an equivalent discontinuity in its finish elevation on the other side, too), because the coming Grid Panels are going to need something to lay down into, so as their top surfaces will wind up flush with the adjoining stone (concrete), creating the smooth even surface required for flight operations up here.
So ok.
So we create a 1'-10" deep Cutout along the full length of the Catacombs, across the width of the Castle Roof where it spans the Catacombs, by raising the elevation of the Roof concrete elsewhere (thus forming our Parapet over by the Flame Trench, as well as its matching elevation discontinuity on the other side of the Cutout we thereby created), and I've marked all that up S-310 to let you see it.
And it's down in that Cutout where we find the scene of the next crime, and that crime scene has quite a bit to tell us.
The floor of the Cutout can't hack it, on its own, and needs still more reinforcement.
And for that, they embedded 1½" by 13" steel plates (yeah, that oughtta be fairly sturdy) into the concrete, full width across the Cutout, everywhere two of the Grid Panels would abut, and that turns out to be on 8'-0" centers, from one end of the Catacombs to the other, and then some (refer back, please, to S-345, to find out the precise length of a "and then some," ok?), and those things got a little help in the form of an additional 1½" thick steel plate, full length, welded edge-up on its centerline, this one being 9½" tall, buttressed by 1" thick stiffener plates, 2'-0" on center.
Yep. That oughtta do it.
The Grid Panels are attached to that thing with the welded-down bolts you see in Details 3 and 4 on S-351
And no, I'm not gonna color everything up for you, ok? You're gonna have to work some of this stuff out for yourself, and if you've somehow manged to come this far, and yet still cannot... well... I'm not sure what to say about that, but... I ain't coloring the goddamned bolts up for you and that's that.
But before we can bolt those sonofabitches down, we must first emplace a 5" thick layer of Foam Concrete across the bottom of the full extent of the Cutout, follow that up with 2" of SAND, and then and only then can we get the fucking crane and start lifting the goddamned Grid Panels off of the cribbing they're laying on, and ever so carefully setting them down in there, minding the bolts sticking up, minding the edges of the Cutout, and finally, at long last, lower them fucks down in there (mind them tag-lines, mind your fingers, mind your feet).
Here's a look at that end of things, the bottomest layers of the Layer Cake, with yet another different marking-up of a drawing that we're all well and truly getting sick of, yes, one more time, S-351, which we cannot seem to escape no matter how hard we try.
And then, just to keep things interesting, once it's all been squared up, leveled up, bolted down, inspected over, and approved across, by the Cognizant Authorities, we get to pour Cement-Water Grout down into the underlying layer of sand through all of those 2" Ø holes we cut into the bottoms of the Cake Pans, just to kinda grout it in there a little better, (that really oughtta do it, eh?).
Are we done yet?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH...thud.
Hell no.
Hell motherfucking no, we're not done yet!
Now you get to fill the Panels with more concrete.
Lots more concrete.
Fill 'em up!
Completely. From the upper surface of the Cake Pan down there at the very bottom, all the way up to the very top edge of the Top Layer of steel. Get it smooth and even with the flat tops of our Mystery I-Beams and the 2" x ⅜" edge-up bars that run between them.
Oughtta be fun working that stiff-ass aggregatey shit down in there, through and around all that goddamned steel in there, going every whichaway, high and low, side-to-side, but you're good at this, right? You can do this, right? Poke at it some. Push it around in there some. Make it happen.
Don't break your leg or ankle by falling down with your foot wedged awkwardly between the grid members of the Top Layer of the Layer Cake, while you're working the long wooden handle of whatever it is you're using, pushing the fucked-up concrete that's coming at you like a Lahar (which it is, actually) from the back end of the concrete truck, beneath a suffocatingly-brutal Florida Sun that's hot enough to melt asphalt, getting it down between the bars, down into every nook and cranny of the lowest depths, destroying every last air pocket down there underneath the bars, on top of the bars, around the bars, and everywhere else too, no gaps, no voids, solid like a motherfucker, edge-to-edge, through and through.
And so it was done.
And so it came to pass that the Grid Panels got laid in, and bolted down, and grouted, and filled, and joint sealer was applied around all of the openings around all of the edges.
And so was it done.
And now that I've untied the Gordian Knot for you, showing you every thread and strand that made up the original snarl, you now know all of its components, and need no further assistance with locating them or understanding what they are, or what they're made of, here's Apollo39B S-351 Launch Pad Crawlerway Grid Slab Sections And Details one last time, with all of the components colored (with the exception of the fill concrete inside the Panels, because coloring it does not add to the visual, and actually detracts from it by obscuring other components in there), without the overlay swarm of yellow highlighting on the names of everything, so as you can see it all clearly, as-is, in all of its astoundingly-complex glory.
And this gives you the fine-grained "what" of things you need to make sense of them, but as to the "why," I remain in the dark about far more of it than I'd like.
Why were these Grid Panels designed and constructed in such a devilishly complex manner with so very many close-fit interconnecting and interlocking individual parts?
I do not know.
Why were they built two-tier, with a completely separate and distinct Upper Chord resting on top of a Lower Chord?
I do not know.
Why did they spec out those bizarre Mystery I-Beams the way they did?
I do not know.
Why did they lay 5" of Foam Concrete down there in the bottom of the Cutout beneath the Panels?
I do not know.
Why did they then lay 2" of LOOSE SAND on top of the Foam Concrete for the Panels to rest in direct contact on top of?
I do not know.
The entire run of Grid Panels, from Pad Slope to the northern, terminal, end of the Crawlerway, were clearly and deliberately designed and constructed to be easily, simply, and efficiently removable.
Why?
I do not know.
I can toss a few bare-ass guesses at it, but no more than that.
Perhaps one day, further information may fall out of the sky into my lap, and I'll get to elucidate things further.
But not today.
The removable aspect of the Panels causes me to wonder if perhaps, prior to construction and operation, they did not fully trust themselves, and the handling characteristics of their equipment, none of which, nothing of the like, had ever previously appeared anywhere on the face of the Earth, constituted a huge unknown, and which caused them to want to be able to quickly make amends, should things have turned out to be unpleasantly different than expected, as the Crawler lumbered along, carrying its full burden, across the top of the Pad.
If it had irreparably damaged things beneath it as it traveled, an ability to rapidly remove and replace the damaged portions of the Crawlerway would ensure no Program schedule impacts would be incurred as a result.
Perhaps.
And the business of unexpected characteristics extends into the finish design and construction in other ways, too.
The loads, the impress of sheer weight, both static and dynamic was, for the time, a staggering thing which had never been dealt with before. And they did not want to be caught unawares with any of the manifestations which might suddenly jump out at them from their hidden place in the tall grass.
What if, while bearing its load, the Crawler broke down and came to an extended halt, up on the Pad Deck, in an intermediate position somewhere, where they could not set the load down on the Mount Mechanisms?
How long might it be able to sit there before things, slowly... ever so slooowly..... perhaps to the random sounds of a slight "crick" here... a metallic "ping" there.... maybe a subdued and half-muffled "pop" somewhere else..... started happening?
Forces applied through structures act in funny ways. Unseen ways. Ferocious loading induces strain. Causes things to change their shape, oftentimes in ways that cannot be picked up by a human eye. You're looking right at it, and nothing shows. But the materials enduring the loads know, and the stresses create strain, and strain is the actual deformation of things, and those deformations ineluctably redistribute those loads, and if the redistribution causes the load to be felt a little less here, then, like it or not, you're going to be seeing more of that load... there.
Loads will, in so behaving, become concentrated, in places, very specific places, you didn't want them to, and when you're already dealing with staggering loads, any unwanted, unexpected further concentration of those loads anywhere, is an express route to a failed Panel, a catastrophe, and... no.
And I wonder if that SAND was there for this exact reason. I can think of no better, no more elegant solution for dealing with incompletely-answered questions about the potential for unexpected load concentrations, than forcing those loads to travel through a layer of Sand. Sand is a fluid, although people never seem to realize that. And fluids, as anyone who has ever dealt with any kind of system which involves hydraulics knows by instinct, are par excellence the Gold Standard for distributing loads with exquisite evenness across the surfaces of anything and everything which the fluid comes in contact with.
And they wanted that load to be spread across the full and complete expanse of the Panel, evenly, uniformly, and from there, down into Roof and Walls of the Castle, and thence into the Foundation Slab, and finally the Earth itself, and in that way no unwanted, no unexpected, concentrations could develop and begin tilting the system..... toward catastrophe.
But what about the area where the Grid Panels extend down the Pad Slope? There is no Castle beneath those Panels. Over there, you are sitting directly on top of the Ziggurat. So what's going on with it over there?
I do not know.
It is a guesswork on my part, and no more than that.
And what about the Foam Concrete? Could that be more load distribution? Could it be for acoustic reasons? Vibration-dampening during Crawler Operations, or even Vehicle Launch? Weight reduction?
I do not know.
Far far more than this...
I do not know.
And I apologize for it, because I cannot tell you... why.
Very well then, we are nearly done with the Crawlerway up here on the Pad Deck.
One more small item yet to go.
When you enter regimes such as the one we find ourselves working in right now, where loads, forces, and the over all dynamic of things at scale, becomes extraordinarily large, funny stuff starts to happen. Uncanny stuff. Stuff you'd never in your life think of in the first place, or possibly even believe, after you'd been told about it.
And so we find ourselves up here on the Pad Deck, with the Crawler zeroing in on its destination, which is a very small target exactly centered upon all six of the Mount Mechanisms simultaneously, and to hit that target, we're going to be steering the Crawler, very accurately I might add, as it moves across the Grid Panels.
And the Crawler, being a tracked vehicle, with four outsize dual-tracked Truck Assemblies, one on each corner, steers itself more or less by brute force, applied through large Steering Arms, which simply twist the entire Truck Assembly one way or another, causing the whole vehicle to alter direction left or right while traveling, in similar manner as the steering on an automobile works, twisting the front tires left or right to do so.
All well and good.
But the sheer size of the Truck Assemblies and in particular the length of Track, which is made up of solid steel Treads, and which is in full bearing contact with the ground beneath it, causes the Tracks, to a degree increasingly moreso the farther away you get from the center of the Truck when the twist is applied through the Steering Arms, to simply scrape sidewise across the ground, while bearing the full load, and some pretty good shear forces get developed, and in certain ways, it's almost like you're using the Crawler as a very large, and very heavy, grinder, grinding off the surface layer of whatever it is you're traveling across, whenever you alter your direction of travel by steering it.
Out on the open Crawlerway, between the VAB and the Pad, rolling across the surface grade of River Rock, which can happily take the grinding that occurs during steering adjustments in direction, you don't really have to worry about grinding things, and you can easily-enough simply dump more rocks down later on if the ones you just traveled across have become unduly ground up, and as a result, any shear forces developed in steering can be, more or less, ignored.
Not so, up on the Pad Deck.
Those Grid Panels are an interwoven combination of Steel and Concrete on their upper surfaces, and we do not want to be grinding them down, every time we Roll to Pad and back. And it can be pretty rough on the Crawler, too. Undersides of the Treads. Bearings. All kinda stuff in there that we'd rather not be putting any more additional stress on than we really have to. Significant heat gets developed. Spark generation becomes a concern. And we're working in a location where they're very excitable about fire and the sources of ignition that can start a fire. Not recommended. So something's gotta be done about it.
Enter the uncanniness of the dynamic of scale.
Up on the Pad Deck, beneath the twisting Treads of the steered Crawler, plywood becomes a LUBRICANT.
Fucking plywood.
Common, hardware-store sheets of plywood are used to lubricate the undersides of the Crawler's Treads, to keep them from attacking the Grid Panels, and grinding them down.
They also serve as just a trifle more, by way of giving us additional even-load-distribution, but it's their lubrication property that dictates their use.
Once the Stack is down-hard on the Mount Mechanisms, the Crawler gets backed out from underneath it and returns to the Park Site, and the plywood gets picked up and removed, and is no longer a part of the equation up here.
But for a while, every time they Roll to Pad, it is.
And as with everything else out here, everything else that is involved in launching rockets, it can't be easy, it can't be simple, and it can't be straightforward, and it takes on a life of its own, and you wind up with a whole goddamned system, just to lay a bunch of stupid plywood sheets down on the Pad Deck, and in the end it winds up with its own drawing, so ok, so let's go look at the goddamned drawing, so we can learn how something as brain-dead as goddamned plywood works. Sheesh.
So here you go with a no name drawing, one that was clearly added into the Package later on (July 29, 1968, to be precise), which gives me to believe that this is something that they did not consider, back when the original design process was underway, and only gained an awareness of, after they had Rolled Out and back a few times and noticed what was happening up there.
And our "not a Giffels & Rossetti drawing," with no 'S' number for it, although S-339A would have worked perfectly, and in fact, the Volume 9 Number of 9051A did get invoked, is so mind-numbingly simple as to cause you to start wondering about this shit, but of course...
...it's not that simple at all.
So what the fuck, may as well dig in, right on down to the very bottom of it, down into the world of fucking... plywood?
Yep. Plywood.
I'll preface what follows by taking a cynical-ass guess, that somebody, as perhaps with the similar sorts of sombodies we met when we crossed paths with the Hammerhead Crane TPS Inspection Spider Basket Trolley Support Extensible Pipe Boom Psychosis, on Page 55, who found a few things out after the fact, was pretty goddamned embarrassed about it, having completely failed to pick something like this up in the first place, and did not want to be made to look bad, and so they more or less swept this one as far under the rug as they could, covering their tracks as they did so, and... go back to what I shall henceforth be calling "9051A" and give the Title Block a closer look.
Giffels & Rossetti, clearly, are not there, and I'm guessing nobody even bothered to contact them about any of this either, but ok, if they're not there, then... who is?
Well... NASA is, of course, it's their Moon Rocket, right? So they can't avoid it. But... whodunnit?
DRAWN: DOW (illegible) and that's no help.
CHECKED: ...nobody...
ENGINEER: ...nobody...
SUBMITTED: ...nothing...
APPROVED: ...nothing... (although in the upper right of the Title Block we get another APPROVED and this one is by some "IES" or other, which is no help at all.
TITLE: ...nothing...
DWG. NO.: A39.05.00.0ADS041.01 (and good luck with chasing that one down).
PROJ. NO. ...nothing...
SHEET: 9051A.
Lovely. Just fucking lovely.
Nobody wants anything to do with this thing, and nobody stepped forward to own the damn thing, and beyond that, we get a little something to the left of the Title Block telling us the drawing originated to incorporate FEO (Field Engineering Order) # 001, tying us right back to that ridiculous too-long gobbledygook DWG. NO., and...
...that's it, that's all you get.
Like it or lump it.
Then... if you really want to know what the hell's going on here, and you start to look even closer, you come to the horrified realization that this thing has no LOCATION given.
Just you find it!
So... where are we?!?
Are we even in Florida?
Are we up on the roof of the VAB?
Are we in the parking lot of some gas station in Titusville?
Are we on the Pad?
Which Pad?
Over by the LH2 Tank?
...nothing...
The whole fucking thing was hand-waved by people who did NOT want their names attached to any of it.
And if you wanna know where the hell you're gonna be working...
...you get to play a little guessing game.
Just 'cause I'm an OCD-level persistent sonofabitch, I decided to find out where this thing is called from, on a drawing that will tell us where in hell we're supposed to be doing this work. As a contractor, it's kind of nice to know where in hell you're doing the work, and questions like, "Is there 20 running feet of this stuff, or is there 20 running miles of it?" loom large in your day-to-day affairs of trying not to go bankrupt.
And I'm pretty sure I found it, but...
...they're being pretty goddamned coy about it...
...and it's still a guessing game.
But at least it's on the previous sheet in the Package, S-339 9051, and I didn't have to wander in the desert for 40 years looking for it in more distant locations.
But that's some pretty fucking weak tea, right there, and if you were to gainsay me on it, and had more than a wet paper-towel's worth of evidence to back it up, I'd very likely roll right on over and play dead for you with it.
In my own defense on this one, Sheet S-339 9051 does specify FEO # 001 up in the Revisions Block, as Rev 'N', and although the horseshit notation "SEE PART PLAN, SH(illegible)" makes no mention of Rev 'N' or FEO # 001, or goddamned anything, the fucking handwriting (which is noticeably different from all of the handwriting everywhere else on the drawing) on it actually matches the handwriting on 9051A. That said, any time you've been reduced to analyzing goddamned handwriting on a formal engineering document, to find out where the hell you're doing the work, you can rest assured that you're much farther out into the depths of a very dark forest, far far from the trail you're trying to get back on, and the sound of wolves howling can be heard in the distance, and it kind of sounds like they're coming this way, and...
Buncha fucking bullshit, is what it is, whatever it is.
Welcome to my world.
So ok, enough of that crap.
What's going on with this stupid plywood?
I mean, do we really need a full-length set of these weird-ass 2 x 2 x ¼ angles welded down on either side of the Trackways just to tell us where to put the fucked-up sheets of half-inch plywood?
Well, it helps, actually (paint fades, shit happens, yadda yadda yadda), and it makes it a whole lot easier for the crew that's laying them down, and I suppose that when the Crawler gets on top of 'em, it maybe keeps 'em from getting stuck to a Tread and going off to the side somewhere when they're turning, but that's not the real reason.
The real reason is sneaky (isn't everything up here?), and is manifested on 9051A in the form of those "⅜Ø x 0'-1" Slotted Holes (Typ)" cut into the upstanding leg of the angle, on one-foot centers, as shown in Isometric Detail C on the drawing. Section A further goes on to tell us that it's a "Wedge Opening" we're looking at, and its bottom edge is flush even with the top of the half-inch sheet of plywood that's laying there butt up against the face of the upstanding leg of the angle.
Yes yes, I know I know, the drawing clearly states ¼" CL (TYP) between the edge of the plywood sheet and the upstanding leg of the angle, but that's just there to give 'em enough wiggle room to get the damn plywood down in there, in between the sets of angles, in the first place, and when you walk around up there when the plywood's down... yeah, a lot of it's butt up against the upstanding leg of the angle, and it's fine, and it's not like there's a fucked-up inspector coming along with a little gauge, making sure the gap is exactly ¼", and while we're looking close, maybe take note of the horseshit scale of things in Section A, and perhaps compare... oh, I don't know... maybe compare the rendered size of the ¼" gap with the rendered size of the ¼" thickness of the upstanding leg of that angle... or maybe compare the half inch thickness of the goddamned sheet of plywood with... shit... anything at all in Section A, and... this is some really crappy "engineering," and... ok MacLaren, enough. Quit.
So. Whuffo? Whuffo all this weirdie Angle and Wedge nonsense?
Well... in keeping with the utter horseshit aspects of this drawing, they're not letting on with anything about any "wedge" that I can direct your attention to, so instead I get to tell you from personal experience that it's an exceedingly simple piece of flat steel, looking kind of like a Cut Masonry Nail in aspect, but larger, and when they're laying down the plywood sheets, they take a common hammer and bang one of these wedges into that slot once the plywood is down, and in so doing, they firmly keep that sheet of plywood right where they put it, and it's not gonna go anywhere after they've done it, until somebody else comes along with a hammer and bangs it back out again.
Why?
Seems like quite the fucking procedure just to put stupid pieces of plywood down on the Crawler Trackway, and it probably chews up a surprising amount of labor time and cost (it does), so why do it?
Well...
You're in... Florida.
And it's a beautiful hot sunny summer day, and off in the distance, here comes the Crawler, carrying its burden, and you need to be ready for that sonofabitch before it gets to the Pad, and it takes a while to lay down all this fucked-up plywood, and so you're up there blazing away at it, laying it down, several hours, maybe even days, before it gets there.
Ok. Fine. So what?
Well...
Those beautiful hot sunny summer days don't always stay that way.
In the summer around here, often as not, sometimes for literal weeks on end, every afternoon, a pretty good thunderstorm will develop, and when it comes bebopping on through from the west (which is where they come from, ninety percent of the time), it can do so with a bang, and the wind can go from dead calm to forty knots in well under a minute, and there's all that goddamned plywood, just laying there, and that wind is gonna want to...
...pick it up.
And it will pick it up.
And now, all of a sudden, with little to no warning...
You've got 10 foot by 4 foot panels of the stuff, each weighing about 60 pounds, and they're flying in your direction in a flat spin at FORTY KNOTS, edge-on, and that shit might not cut you cleanly in half, but it might come pretty close to doing so, and...
Get that shit secured, and get it secured NOW!
And so they do. Right at the moment they lay it down. They don't wait around. They do it now.
'Cause in Florida... you never know...
And yes, that then introduces the issue of FOD with the goddamned Wedges, and somebody's gotta look into making sure none of 'em got away, and the Pad Deck is pristine come Launch Day, and we've already discussed just how energetic it gets up here when the Igniters kick in, and the turbomachinery ramps up smartly, and you might want to consider what that kind of energy, imparted into a bullet-like steel wedge, perhaps ricocheting around off of the adjacent equipment and structures up there, could wind up doing, if it was to hit something...
...just so.
So it's fucked up, no matter what you do, and you wind up using the goddamned plywood lubrication, complete with a million little steel missiles, and...
So far, they've never had any proper incidents with it...
...which is good, right?
And then... you think about plywood as fucking lubricant one more time, and you recall they graded all the rest of the Crawlerway with goddamned River Rocks to ease things along out there...
...and...
...yep...
River Rocks are a goddamned lubricant too!!!
Imagine that. Fucking rocks as a LUBRICANT!
A working, fully-functional... lubricant.
This is a wild wild place, where wild wild things happen, and everybody is hypnotized and blinded by the bright flames coming out of the rocket, and yeah, that's some pretty impressive shit right there, no doubt...
...but that ain't all of it.
Not by a country mile, that ain't all of it, and a lot of it is outré beyond believing...
...and... yeah.
Pretty rad shit, all the way around.
\\\\\\\
ADDENDUM, 2023 07 10:
And I had no sooner "finished" this page than even more stuff promptly falls out of the sky, directly into my lap, yet again.
I'm beginning to wonder about this stuff. I really am. People seem to be becoming aware, some of them in far-distant lands, and they're starting to send me stuff.
We beat the Crawlerway Grid Panels to death, and were no sooner done with it than fucking photographs of them appear, taken during their removal, refurbishment, and replacement operations on Pad B, as part of the Pad preparations for Project Artemis.
And we get to see the whole deal, including just how rotten some of the steel had become, over the intervening fifty some-odd years since they were first emplaced into the Cutout in the Pad Deck.
Get a look at some of this stuff!
///////
And that should be enough for anybody, shouldn't it?
Let's get the hell out of here, ok?
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