The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
A Cable Tray Tale: Where the Weird Things Are, and How They Got There.
I shall presume that you've bounced over here from
Page 72 where we were delving into the mysteries of where MacLaren took that
photograph of Wade and Kevin Ivey from, which shows them on the Lower Hinge Access Platform, the day we hung the Orbiter Access Arm on the FSS.
But if not, and you've arrived here via other means, no worries, this page should stand alone, on its own merits, just fine.
We're gonna learn about Electrical Stuff by following a single Cable Tray from where it begins, to where it ends, and in so doing gain better insight into how
all of the Electrical Stuff on the towers works, ok?
Ok.
This will be our one and only walk down an Electrical Pathway through the drawings in this series of photo essays, and for a lot of you, I'm sure it will be one walk too many, but oh well. The whole place is
crawling with cables, and a bit of sense as to how it gets done isn't going to kill any of you. I promise. And of course, never forget,
all of these digressions and side-branches to the overall
story are,
every one, just by way of concocting enough of an excuse to further
elucidate the Launch Pad, down at the level of detail which a proper history of things requires.
To begin with, we have arrived at something called the "Cable Tray Access Catwalk", which runs out across the Struts between the FSS and the Hinge Column at Elevation 187'-0". On its far end, our Catwalk takes us all the way out right next to the Hinge Column, where it stops dead, pretty much in the Middle of Nowhere, right next to a
Three-Layer-Deck of oddly-shaped Electrical Crossovers, but the structural drawing that shows us the Catwalk is actually
worse than useless for that simple-enough task because it's
misleading.
So here's
79K14110 sheet S-4, again, labeled to let you know how they're trying to trip you up with sly depictions of things that fully and completely satisfy the
letter of the law, while at the same time completely flouting the
sprit of the law.
This three-layer-deck of small, round, closely-spaced platforms wrapped around the Hinge Column, despite its dimuative size when compared with everything else around it, along with another four-layer-deck which can be found farther down on the Hinge Column, is one of the
defining features of the Pad.
These are the things that, once you notice them, they give the Pad a healthy kick in the direction of the outlandish science-fiction overall look and feel which the whole place is pretty much
dripping with.
They look
fakey.
Like something you might encounter in the lurid cover art of one of those cheapie sci-fi paperbacks that were printed back in the 1950's.
Or maybe, I dunno,
Frank Lloyd Wright snuck in while everybody was on morning break, and in the very few minutes he was in there unseen, he just kinda
grabbed a drawing that was being worked on, dropped these little nuggets in there without saying a word to anybody, and then snuck right back out again before anybody returned from their break,
and nobody noticed, and the drawing got approved and included into 79K14110. Maybe. I dunno.
Whatever the deal might be, I
love 'em!
And in addition to the Crossover Deck "Stacked Dinner Plates," we're also being given access, right alongside our Catwalk, to a stack of 3
Cable Trays running parallel with it along its southern margin, and the drawings I have in my possession seem to do well enough with the
bottom TWO of them, but the top one has so far eluded me. And since I'm the Village Idiot, I'm just gonna go with the bottom
one, only, in the hopes of keeping it simple enough for even the Village Idiot to be able to follow and understand, as he holds you by the hand and walks you through The Dark Forest to the unsettling sound of wolves faintly howling somewhere off in the far distance.
79K14110 sheet E-12 takes us to the scene of the crime up at the 200'-0" elevation of the FSS (yeah, I know, the Catwalk is at 187'-0" but this is the drawing that shows us the relevent Cable Trays), and since I'm such a helpful young man, I've pasted in the Catwalk itself, from 79K14110 sheet S-4, which you've already seen, and this electrical drawing is pretty poor quality to begin with, and pretty thin on the ground with otherwise useful information, so that's why I went ahead and slapped that thing in there, ok?
And E-12 might be a bad drawing, but it's good enough to tell us that a trio of somethings called "F-1, F-2", and "EF-1" live in the "Lower Power Tray" and that's all we're gonna need, to let us dig down a little farther into The Strange and Wonderful World of Electricity, and maybe learn a little something about our weirdie Catwalk to Nowhere at Elevation 187'-0", along the way.
Out here at the Launch Pad, electricity comes up out of the ground. Jesus makes it, or maybe the Devil, or something, and after it comes up out of the ground, they grab hold of it with big copper cables and make it go where they need it, and make it do what they want it to, when they get it there.
Electricity is funny stuff. It very
defintiely wants to kill you. It's evil shit. It has murder in its heart at all times, and it's smart, and it's devious, too. And it's invisible, so you'll never see it coming when it seizes its opportunity in the blink of an eye, and
kills you.
I don't actually
believe in electricity. I think it's all Evil Spirits, and I respect it in the exact same manner that I respect Evil Spirits, and I stay the fuck
away from the shit, every chance I get.
But if you're
crafty enough, you can turn the tables on it, and make it do your bidding, and it's exceedingly
powerful stuff, so they invest a
lot of time and trouble into creating the weirdly-complex apparatus to corral it, and once they've got it good and roped-down, they can do truly
amazing stuff with it.
NASA employs some pretty smart people, and they seem to have devised a pretty good system for grabbing hold of the electricity just as it comes up out of the ground, and turning the tables on it to get it to do all the different stuff they do with it.
79K14110 sheet E-1 shows us where the electricity comes up out of the ground, right where they grab hold of it, at a thing called Switching Station 1002.
There's
so much electricity coming up out of the ground here that they had to build a gigantic two-story multi-room heavy steel-reinforced concrete
facility called the PTCR (
Pad
Terminal
Connection
Room), right over top of it, to keep it from getting away from them, and blowing the whole place clear to hell with a giant Blue-white Spark of Death.
79K14110 sheet E-3 shows us where the cables in our Cable Tray which runs alongside the Cable Tray Access Catwalk at Elevation 187'-0" come from, and how they have to be worked in amongst a whole bunch of other stuff, and as a sort of "Oh, by the way," it's also telling us that Switching Station 1002 runs the Electrical Show for
the whole Pad.
Everything.
The whole place.
E-3 is where we get introduced to a couple of "
Feeders" that supply electrical power to the whole top of the RSS (where you can find quite the collection of Heavy Hitters), and those feeders are named, creatively enough, "F-1" and "F-2" (which are two of the three inhabitants that live in our Cable Tray), and some of these electrical drawings have got some pretty obscure and arcane symbols on 'em, so here's
79K14110 sheet E-2, with the Cable ID Symbol (which looks for all the world like a little
Pill, and after you've done enough of this electrical crap, you're gonna be needing to
take some goddamned pills, preferrably the
strong ones) highlighted, so as you can recognize it for what it is, when you see it again, in some of the other drawings we'll be looking at, as we wind along down The Electrical Pathway, through The Dark Forest.
From here, the electrical package kind of jumps forward, and we're going to go right ahead and jump forward with it, all the way to the RSS Power Substation which is located inside the Hoist Equipment Room, which is where our good friends F-1 and F-2 wind up going, and you get to see that on
79K14110 sheet E-5 (and we're skipping E-4 because it doesn't have anything useful to add to our Cable Tray Story). Which means that we now know what's up with the beginning and end of the cables in our Cable Tray, so it's fill-in work from here on.
But before we go, maybe you noticed that little "Existing Oil Switch" notation up there just beneath where it tells you this stuff is coming from Switching Station 1002 in the yellow-highlighted areas.
What's an "Oil Switch"?
Is it like how you change the grade of gasoline at the pump when you're gassing up the car, by pressing the button that changes the type of gasoline from Absurdly, Stupidly, Expensive to Still More Expensive Than I Want To Pay?
Hardly.
79K14110 doesn't get into it, but 79K10338, which got here first, of course,
does.
And they show you an "Oil Switch" (not the
exact one, but it'll do just fine as an example) on
79K10338 sheet E-10.
Wicked-looking things, aren't they?
Probably don't wanna go messing around with any of
this stuff unless you can prove that you're fully checked-out, certified, and qualified for the operation and maintenance of Weapons-Grade Evil Spirits.
That shit'll fuck you up pretty good if it finds a way to get hold of you, so let's just continue right on with staying the hell away from it, ok?
And I guess we'd best sort out "EF-1" while we're at it here, too, 'cause that thing's right there in our Tray with the other guys.
Turns out that the "EF" in EF-1 stands for "Emergency Feeder", and this thing picks up the slack when the main power goes pfft and everything stops working. Read all about it on
79K14110 sheet E-6.
So ok.
So now that we have positive ID for all
three denizens of our Cable Tray, may we
please see how we get from "here" to "there" with it?
But of course.
And we'll work from the bottom up with it, ok?
The F-1 F-2 Train leaves the Station down at ground level in the PTCR, headed for parts unknown, and you get that end of things on
79K14110 sheet E-7.
And it snakes its way across the PTCR, picks up another passenger (EF-1), and then it goes right on through a concrete wall and enters the innermost bowels of the tunneling inside the Pad, aiming for the place where the Tunnel lurches straight upwards, headed for the underside of the FSS, and
79K14110 sheet E-8 gives you all of that.
And what winds up happening after it punches through that concrete wall, turns out to be some pretty-substantial
modifications to the original Apollo-vintage concrete guts of the Pad, to accommodate that fact that there's no more LUT, and instead, all of the electrical
Power is going to have to be routed up through this brand-new FSS-thing they were going to have to build for their Space Shuttle, and they wound up using
some of the existing Apollo stuff inside the guts of the Pad, but they also had to make a bunch of
new stuff down there, too.
79K10338 sheet S-14 shows us how they had to dig a pretty goodly
hole down into the Pad, where they then made themselves a nice reinforced-concrete
shaft that bounced off to the side, down at its bottom, where it broke through the wall of the existing Apollo concrete, and this is a good time for a little review of all that stuff, just to make sure we
really know where the hell we are.
Sheet S-305 of the original Apollo Program Pad B drawings, Volume 9, Civil and Structural, gives us a cross-section right through the middle of the pad, right through the centerline of the Saturn V, on an east/west line, and lets us see that the original Apollo Electrical Tunnel (which headed from the back of the PTCR to the underside of the 9099 Building, and which you are presumed to already be plenty familiar with, but if not,
here's where you learn all about it on Page 41) was embedded quite-deeply into things, running along the "back" wall of the PTCR, and I've labeled it for you, letting you know where our new Space Shuttle Cable Tray Tunnel is going to be punching into it.
Now that you know how
deep it was, here's another look at it, in plan view,
Sheet S-301 of the original Apollo Program Pad B drawings, Volume 9, Civil and Structural, to let you see where it was in relationship to all the rest of the stuff on and under the surface of the main body of the Pad. I wan't you to
know where this thing
is, ok?
And the reason I wanted you to know where it is, is so that you can make useful sense of
79K24048 sheet E-346, which is
very instructive, but complicated enough that you need to bring a proper sense of
where things are along with you, before you take a look at it.
And I've colored, and labeled, the
exact Cable Tray we're interested in, but beware. We're bouncing back and forth all over multiple drawing packages, which were all put together in different
years, depicting different
stages of the evolution and development of the whole Space Shuttle Program, and quite a few of them were done
before anything was ever built,
when it was all a bunch of semi-vague concepts. So there's going to be
inaccuracies, and there's going to be
self-inconsistencies, and you're
already supposed to be fully aware this stuff, but... I am here and now
reminding you of this,
yet again.
And as we step through things, I'm going to do my dead-level best to show you where the goddamned Cable Tray actually
wound up, as opposed to some vague generality on a drawing that was created literal
years before the first Sparky ever started dragging Tray Segments up on the
structure, and assembling them into what wound up being used (for a while, at least, and maybe for the full duration, but I cannot know, and again, you're being
put on notice with this stuff) on the towers.
I want my shit to be
accurate! I want my shit to be full-tilt
Historian-Grade Resource Material.
And if I have doubts, or if I see
obvious inconsistencies in the
Contract Documents, I'm going to
warn you (and any proper Historians who at some point find themselves having to
deal with this thing). And if I
know beyond the shadow of a doubt (maybe using the you-can-see-it-for-yourself contents of the photographs I took, or other equally rock-solid source material), then I'm simply going to
tell you, and that's just about as much as any human can ever do, so... ok.
You've been
warned.
Again.
Alright, where were we?
Oh yeah, the F-1 F-2 EF-1 Train had just blown a hole in the side of the back wall of the PTCR, twenty-five feet
underground, and was now headed
upwards, ready to sprout from the surface of the earth underneath the FSS like some kind of goddamned
petunia or something.
And we were worried about having any faith or trust in
exactly which Cable Tray F-1 F-2 and EF-1 might be going into, and you get
nervous about that stuff because...
79K10338.
Which got to the Pad
first, after all, back when Wilhoit was erecting Sheffield's steel, and...
And it's the Responsible Party for blowing a hole in the bck wall of the PTCR and building the goddamned tunnel to the surface, and we just saw that on
79K10338 sheet S-14, and we're minding our own business, but we're right there
in 79K10338 anyway, and...
What's
this?!?
Son of a
fucking bitch, but why does this stuff need to be so goddamned
difficult?.
79K10338 sheet E-4 is,
clearly, showing us F-1, F-2, and EF-1, just like
79K14110 sheet E-3, (which is basically
the same drawing) showed them to us, but...
And here is where we learn that the bastards are happily reusing the exact same little Pill Symbol, with the exact same goddamned
ID number in it, but...
It's for a
wholly different thing!
God in heaven, why?
Why do a thing like that, and say not a single peep about it anywhere?
And no answer is given, and I suppose you're just supposed to
know that kind of stuff, and...
Clearly,
electricity is not dangerous enough in and of itself, and I guess they figured they'd maybe...
spice it up a little, just to kind of keep us on our toes, and make sure we really
really really know what goddamned wire it really really really is, before we go
hands-on with it.
And about the only ray of light that I can see in
this district of Nightmare City, is that
these 79K10338 F-1 and F-2 cables turn out to be the MLP Jumper Cables, and we crossed paths with that, glancingly, but still... way back on Page 41, and now here we are, all these pages later, and all of a sudden, we discover we're going to find out where MLP Power came from, and...
...that's actually pretty cool, and if The Hand of Fate is
giving it to me, I'd be a fool to turn it down by ignoring it.
So.
Here we go with the MLP Jumper Cables. The things that furnish electrical
power to the whole MLP, with, of course, a ready-to-launch Space Shuttle sitting directly on top of it.
And the
precise 79K10338
item that set off this whole Cascade of Bullshit, is
their rendering of these items on 79K10338 sheet E-23, which I was looking at to see if it contained any additional useful information on our Cable Tray
Tunnel, and on E-23, the kinds of people who really
look at things, working to make damn good and sure they've
got it right, before they
commit to it, just might
notice that for our good friends F-1 and F-2, the Cable Tray
Numbers which are given on them
Do Not Match, and...
It's off to the races we go!
And I'd stumbled upon the Power Cables for the MLP completely by accident, so now that we're here, let's go look at 'em, how 'bout?
And of course the world
immediately goes crazy, once again, and we find ourselves dealing with
three significant cycles of modifications that got incorporated into the drawings of this stuff, and I need to tease out
only the thread which is in full agreeement with my
photographs of the place, and, once again to the trampoline we go, to bounce off wildly on yet
another divergence, and...
In The Beginning, was Pad A, and the lord saw it was
not good, and so he immediately started scribbling, and scrubbing, and erasing, and drawing lines on top of lines, and issuing EO's (
Engineering
Orders), and slapping it all over the place into older drawings, and younger drawings, and drawings that nobody had even
made yet, and...
Fuck me.
, and we're gonna stop here, and use a pair of General Arrangement drawings, to let you see The Whole Train, in all its glory, before
digging back in.