The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 5: Space Shuttle Launch Pad, Viewed From the Beach Access Road.
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Here we see the view you might have gotten early in the morning on your way to work in the summer of 1980, having driven from your home in Cocoa Beach, Florida, north on State Road A1A through the full length of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and beyond into NASA property on the Kennedy Space Center, directly past Launch Complexes 34, 37, 40, 41, 39-A, and finally to the cutoff for the pad access road which takes you inland, away from the beach, to where your job awaits you in the Sheffield Steel field trailer at pad 39-B, invisible in this image, hidden beyond the fifty-foot high concrete bulk of the pad itself, a little left of the open skeleton of the RSS sitting on its falsework. On your way in, driving your car to work, you have pulled over to the side of the pad access road where that road meets the pad perimeter and takes a sharp bend (Note: reference image not contemporaneous with photograph above), aimed your camera at your jobsite, and this photograph is the result.
Everything is much bigger than it looks. Much MUCH bigger. To the right of the open skeleton of the growing RSS resting atop its temporary falsework support, itself resting atop the concrete of the pad, the red multi-platformed framework of the FSS towers above all around it, topped by the Hammerhead Crane, with the Lightning Mast on top of that. From the grass at ground level, to the top of the Lightning Mast, it is just about exactly 400 feet.
A full-size soccer pitch could fit on end, longways, between the grass and the top of the Lightning Mast with room to spare.
Everything you see at the distance of the pad in this photograph, is cyclopean.
In the foreground, just past the pad perimeter fence, a parked tractor awaits its driver to come and start it up, pulling a bush-hog behind it, in a never-ending battle against the onslaught of the vegetation in Florida which will swallow everything and bury it beneath a carpet of weeds, woody scrub, and trees, if not held at bay by direct action.
This is a near-perfect image for learning our way around the pad, using the nomenclature with which the whole launch complex was designed and built, and we're going to do just that, below.
So get ready for it, 'cause here it comes.
The RSS was constructed using a coordinate system, and the coordinate system is absolutely vital, because without it you cannot know precisely where anything is, or where anything is supposed to go, and without knowing precisely where anything is... well... it's going to be a lot harder to build something.
And for those of you who find such things distasteful, tedious, or incomprehensibly-confusing, please accept my apologies, but we're stuck with this stuff, inescapably embedded within a three-dimensional universe made out of space-time, so in order to learn more about how it was done, constructing Pad B, we're going to have to come to terms with this one.
Also, mathematical literacy, even just a rudimentary wee little bit of it, not much at all actually, and certainly not anything radical, is the Keys to the Kingdom and all which lies there within.
So.
The coordinate system.
The steel which the RSS comprised was laid out with a sort of 3-Dimensional road map, and that map used a pair of alphanumeric coordinates to locate where things were on the map, with an additional, third, coordinate for how far things were above the map.
For locations on the map, the coordinates were chosen for greatest agreement with the placement of the primary structural framing elements of the RSS. The heavy stuff that held the whole thing together, and held it up in the air, too.
On the map, points of reference were given letter designations in one direction (think of it as north and south and you won't be too far wrong), and number designations in the other direction (which we can think of as east and west, although please keep in mind that since the RSS moved around, you could get into trouble with that kind of thing if you weren't careful about it).
For locations above the map, they simply used sea level as their starting point (on the beach in Florida, you're very close to sea level at all times when standing on the ground), and let the elevation above sea level of whatever item might they might be locating above the map be... the elevation, which is our third and final coordinate.
So the back of the RSS is Column Line A (and no, I never liked the fact that they had to pick the back of the damn thing for Line A, but that's what was done, and with good reason, I might add), and the front of the RSS is Column Line B. Engineering design drawing package 79K14110 is the precise set of instructions we built the RSS to, and in the structual portion of that very large package (several hundred large-scale drawings), structural drawing S-24 shows us Column Line A, and structural drawing S-25 shows us Line B.
So as we go from the back of the RSS to the front, we go from Line A to Line B, and here they both are together.
In the other direction, along the length of the RSS, they called the Hinge Column, Line 1, and over on the far end, 160 feet away, you had Line 7 and each line represented primary framing steel at any given location.
Additionally, as a result of the fact that almost all of the salient coordinate features corresponded to where primary structural columns were located, holding things up in the air, most of the time the coordinates would be referred to as Column Lines, as in "Column Line" B, or "Column Line" 4, or what have you.
The Steel Columns make the structure, and without them you wind up with nothing more than a pile of steel laying on the ground, and that's not going to be very useful, so Column Lines are what you're going to be encountering a lot.
So now, after all that, we're finally ready to go back and look at the image up on the top of this page (here it is again, to make it easier to get to), and try to figure out what it is we're looking at.
And you're looking at the RSS up on top of the pad, supported by its falsework, almost exactly face-on.
We're looking at the front of the RSS, which means we're looking at the Line B side of it, with the Line A side of it behind, clearly-visible through the open-air structure of Line B, and ever so slightly to the left of the Line B primary steel framing.
I originally showed up on the job in the middle of March, 1980, and if memory serves (and I'm an old man, and memory is such a fallible thing) there was only a single line of falsework over by the FSS that had already been erected on the first day I showed up at work, and this is the first picture I ever took of things, and it has only been a few months, and already the Union Ironworkers from Local 808 working for Wilhoit have erected an amazing amount of heavy iron, and the steel bones of the RSS are already nearly complete!
I've said it before, and I'll say it again right now, heavy iron goes fast.
Line A is mostly complete, including the great crossed diamond, emblematic of that whole side of the RSS in general, and the back of the Payload Changeout Room in particular. Please note that in the linked drawing, we are looking at Line A in the opposite direction from which it is seen in the photograph at the top of this page. We'll let this be our first introduction into "opposite hand" views, where top and bottom stay put, but left and right switch places, in the exact same manner as reflections seen in a mirror, and "opposite hand" "opp hand" and occasionally "O.H." will be encountered on the included drawings too many times to count in what follows, and it must be payed close attention to at all times, lest we become disoriented, and lose full understanding of what we're looking at.
Line B is mostly complete.
The Hinge Column is mostly complete, full-height, although it does not yet have its upper and lower bearings which will allow the whole RSS to pivot around through 120 degrees of travel. It's poorly located for visibility, sitting in front of the left-hand part of steel structure of the FSS behind it in our photograph, but if you look very close, you can see an actual gap in it, down where the Lower Bearing will connect it to the RSS Primary Framing centered at elevation 134'-2", once it has been installed (the part above the gap is being held in place by the Struts which attach it to the FSS). I'm going to show you the engineering drawings for both of those bearings, but in no way are you expected to understand them in the slightest, so for now, just kind of marvel at the complexity of things and maybe admire the beauty and symmetry of the artwork itself, and let the rest of it go, ok?
The Upper Bearing is shown on Sheet M-2 in Pad B drawing package 79K14110, and the Lower Bearing is shown on Sheet M-3 in the same drawing package. I will return to these wonders later on, after you've had more time to get used to this stuff and learn about things, and get more practice with figuring out how to read engineering drawings, too, when you will hopefully be somewhat better equipped to make proper sense of their complexities, and how they actually work.
Ok, back to the Rotating Service Structure as a whole. Serious inroads have been made in hanging the floor steel for the three main levels which constitute the bottom of the RSS (79K14110 A-17), at Elevation 112'-0" (79K14110 S-31), Elevation 125'-0" (79K14110 S-32), and Elevation 135'-7" (79K04400 S-63) which is the main floor level of the RSS as a whole, and also the floor level of the PCR which the entire structure was built to support and give function to.
Please note that the linked drawing for Elevation 135'-7" has a different 79K number (79K04400 instead of 79K14110, and this his how you distinguish different projects and separate jobs from each other), and it's actually from Pad A, and it's being used here because it's higher-quality than its counterpart for Pad B, and also because the Pad B version of this drawing includes a lot of additional modifications steel, none of which existed, nor had been so much as considered for design, fabrication, and erection, when the photograph at the top of this page was taken.
Pad A was five feet lower in elevation than Pad B, so all given elevations on that 79K04400 drawing (and all of the other 79K04400 drawings) will be incorrect for Pad B by that amount, so please keep that kind of thing in mind, when examining these drawings, lest it cause you trouble in some way.
And if you're still with me, after all of what has come before, still reading, then you can expect to make it all the way through. You have had to work, in order to gain sensible understanding, and from here on, most of the basic concepts will be things you have already gained a degree of familiarization with, and will also be things you can understand.
Award yourself a bit of time off, perhaps something to eat or drink, rest up a little, too much is too much, and up to this point, you've had a lot.
You're doing just fine with this.
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