The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 73: Jack Petty on the Pad Deck with the RSS as Backdrop.
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So I guess we're gonna take a very short break, up on the Pad Deck, as I pester Jack Petty (You've already met him repeatedly throughout Part 2 of this narrative, and you're going to continue encountering him in more pages yet to come.) to please stop, while we're walking along, so I can get a photograph of him with the enormity of the RSS, two hundred some-odd feet distant behind where he's located east of the Flame Trench, as backdrop.
And I'm sure my ears were being filled with no end of him grumbling "Hurry the fuck up and take the fucking picture, goddammit," as I got into position to take it, but he did in fact stop, and he afforded me the grace of time to go do something stupid, even as the work we were supposed to be doing elsewhere had to wait for those few moments that it took me to do this.
Jack gives it scale, but it's a false scale, because no matter how gigantic our Steel Apparition might look, sky-blottingly above him in the photograph, it's actually much bigger than that, because it's quite a bit farther away from me than Jack, and the human eye doesn't always deal with stuff like that as well as we'd like it to.
But for some reason it caught my eye, and caused me to interrupt what we were doing at the time, and aside from the knowledge that this image represents an interruption in the flow of work, I have no idea whatsoever what that work might have been, this day.
The moment is lost forever, and all that remains is what you're seeing here.
The point of view from which the image was taken tells us that I was interested in the cyclopean scale and sci-fi otherworldliness of the RSS, dark and foreboding against the sharpness of a clear blue Florida-winter sky, and I wanted to get as much of it in frame as I could.
Note the lines of the top runners on the Removable Handrails on either side of the Flame Trench, which you can see behind Jack, waist-level. Those top runners are 3'-6" above the concrete of the Pad Deck, and you can see that the rails on the far, West, side of the Flame Trench are just the barest little bit below the ones that are closer to us, on the near, East, side of the Flame Trench, and this tells us incontrovertibly that my eye-level position was somewhere between three and three and a half feet above the concrete. So I was either stooping down low, to get my photograph, or perhaps I might even have been sitting down when I took this shot.
All the better to flatten and foreshorten the level expanse which we were on top of, in an effort to allow as much of the absurd vertical extent of the RSS as possible to dominate the frame.
Ominously-complex metal things, the size of ocean liners, don't just hang around up in the sky like this. Except that sometimes they do. And it never failed affect me, and I was forever attempting to capture That Which Cannot Be Captured, knowing full-well that it was never gonna happen.
And after what I just put you through on Page 72 with the OAA Lift, this little break we're taking right now is well-earned, and we're not going to be digging any further into things with our photograph up at the top of this page.
Take it easy.
Save your energy.
You're gonna be needing it for what's coming next.
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