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 (Well...
maybe only a "single" one, but... you know how things around here have this weird tendency to sort of...
grow, right?) 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
spirit of the law.
This three-layer-deck of small, round, closely-spaced platforms wrapped around the Hinge Column, despite its diminutive 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 relevant 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
definitely 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, preferably 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 the 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 want 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, coming up vertically out of the top of that Cable Tunnel, over there near the southwest corner of the FSS, west of the FSS Elevators, along with all the rest of the petunias, and you got to see that on
79K24048 sheet E-346 (which you get to see again, here, because, it's
quite helpful) just a minute ago.
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 back 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 agreement 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, there was Pad A, and the lord saw that it was
not good, and so he immediately started scribbling, and scrabbling, and scrubbing, and erasing, and drawing lines on top of lines, and issuing EO's (
Engineering
Orders), and haphazardly slapping shit all over the place into older drawings, and younger drawings, and drawings that nobody had even
made yet, and...
Fuck me.
Once Upon A Time...
...it looked like this...
...on Pad
A Drawing (because there is no counterpart to this thing in my Pad B Drawings and also because we need to start out with Pad A to see how this thing
changed going forward in time)
79K04400 sheet E-9. And they're specifically telling us to reuse the old MSS Power Feeders on this drawing. Make a note of it, please.
Look things again, in plan view, on Pad A drawing
79K04400 sheet E-6. And notice, please, in addition to the old MSS Feeders, we get to see the old LUT Feeders too. Keep that in mind, ok?
And since we're here, and since we seem to have developed a curiosity about the old MSS Feeders, let's look at the Arming Tower (Which got renamed into the
Mobile
Service
Structure midway through Project Apollo, and just that
renaming is quite the story, but not now, ok?), just so you can see why those power cables that you just saw on E-6 wound up as far south, away from where the FSS got built, as they did.
The MSS, in its service position, was parked south of the LUT, forcing all of its stuff to the south right along with it.
And you can check out where the Electrical Interface was on
Original Apollo Engineering Drawing A-1 from the Rust Engineering Arming Tower package, and the only reason you can
do that, is because,
impossibly, The Fates deemed that yet another Anonymous Benefactor step forward from the enveloping mists, unannounced, without warning, and put the Architectural Drawings for the Mobile Service Structure into my hands, unasked for, and...
This only happened mere
days ago, and the Uncanny-O-Meter is fully pegged, and...
I remain unable to thank these people
directly, but let me tell you, the thanks runs pretty goddamned DEEP.
And there's not really anything more I can say about that miraculous end of things, so it's back to the narrative we go, with maybe a slight shiver as we do so.
And now we have a better idea of where we're coming from
electrically, but it's
still tricky, because the Electrical Interface for the MSS on Pad A, wound up being completely
different from Pad B, and by luck, we get to actually
see that difference.
On Pad A, the Electrical Interface was a sort of stub Power Pedestal. It consisted of a framework that stuck up above the Pad Deck, but
at Pad B they removed the Electrical Interface framework altogether, and it was a covered Pit, instead. Note that in the Pad B image, the LUT is still in transit, and has not quite reached its final destination where they can set it down on top of the Mount Mechanisms.
So ok. So once upon a time,
while we're still at Pad A, there was a Mobile Service Structure, and just like everything else out here, it needed
electricity.
But then they got rid of the MSS, and they got rid of the LUT and turned it into an FSS, and commandeered the electricity for other purposes, and patched it over to the base of that brand new FSS they just got finished cobbling together from cannibalized pieces of the LUT that it once was.
And they ran the commandeered electricity from what used to Feed the MSS up to Elevation 72'-6" (Pad
A elevations, right?) on their FSS through a Cable Tray that came vertically up through the Pad Deck, via a pair of very misleadingly-named Feeders, named F-1 and F-2, that suddenly became F-3 and F-4, half-way to where they were going, but apparently that wasn't enough (in more ways than one), and they also ran commandeered electricity from what used to Feed the LUT, and that took an entirely different route up to the scene of the crime, and became EF-7, which was Emergency Power, in addition to everything else that was going on, and am I even speaking English anymore? I can't tell. This shit's starting to
get to me.
So whatever the fuck it was that I just said, in whatever goddamned weird-ass language it might have been, you get to see it for yourself on
79K04400 sheet E-10, and isn't she a
beauty?
Whew!
Which is all well and good, I'm sure, except that, over on Pad B,
they did it in a completely different way!
On B Pad, that vertical Cable Tray that sprouts up out of the ground over there near the FSS Side-1 / Side-2 Perimeter Column, over there near the southeast corner of the FSS down on the concrete of the Pad Deck,
does not exist.
Not there!
And no, I
don't know why it's so different. It just
is. But while we're at it here, I oftentimes hear people asking, "Which Pad is that?" when they're looking at a photograph of the place, and this is one of the very small, very sly, little details that let you distinguish one from another, A from B.
A Pad has the Power Feeders for the MLP coming up out of the ground through a vertical Cable Tray very near the southeast corner of the FSS, whereas B Pad does not have that vertical Tray, and the Power Feeds in from underneath FSS Elevation 80'-0", coming across from Side 3, where all the other petunias are sprouting up out of the ground. But watch out! Later on, they put
other vertical Trays in there,
between where the vertical MLP Power Tray at Pad A lives, and the southeast corner column of the FSS, and they did so on BOTH Pads, and that one will trip you up, if you're not hip to it.
Here's a (I wish it was better, but this is one of those places where good photographs apparently don't exist) look at the
Canister Lift for STS-122, on Pad A, labeled to let you see that vertical Power Feeder Cable Tray, along with the "new" ones, that are only there to confuse the hell out of you.
And here's a look (again, very poor image, but... sigh) at the
Canister Lift for STS-115 at Pad B, also labeled, but boy is it ever hard to see down in there, and maybe overzoom the image if you can, because that vertical Power Tray
is not there.
And now,
finally, we get to go back to Pad
B, which is of course the place where we got into this insane snarl of Electrical Trouble, and then we go look at the Empire State Building (well... that's what it looks like to
me), and we get to follow our bogus MLP Power Feeders with the damnable ID's that are the
exact same as the ones we're
looking for, but they're...
not, goddamnit.
79K10338 sheet E-8 tells the tale.
And now, at long last, we get to go see the Pad B drawing that corresponds to Pad A drawing 79K04400 sheet E-10, which you just saw, and which is what tells us that, over on Pad B,
things were different.
Pad B drawing
79K10338 sheet E-22 shows us how they went at supplying Power to the MLP differently than they did at Pad A, and when you compare it with
79K04400 sheet E-10, which you've already seen, the differences become stark.
E-22 does not tell us
why they chose such a different design philosophy for routing the Power Feeders on Pad B, but my gut feeling is that the
existing stuff left over from Project Apollo, which fed Power to the MSS, was in some way deemed unfit for the task, most likely due to degradation, or even damage, of some kind, but maybe not, maybe it was something else, and we'll never know, but this is an excellent demonstration of how things
change, from place to place, from time to time, and you must
always be ready to turn on a dime, and go at it a different way, when existing things simply look right at you, and with a very soft voice, say, "No."
Alright, already!
Enough already! Can we
PLEASE get back to our original
story? The one were we were attempting to follow a couple of goddamned
wires through a Cable Tray, which turned out to be the reason that the Catwalk I took the photo of Wade and Kevin Ivey from, got built in the first place?
Pretty please?
With cream and sugar on it?
Yes, Tony, you may
now have your goddamned motherfucking
pony, and I hope you're happy!
Which
now takes us to
79K14110 sheet E-23, which is the "Empire State Building" drawing for Drawing Package 79K14110, which built the
RSS on Pad B, instead of 79K10338, which was the Drawing Package that built the
FSS on Pad B (which was called the "SSAT" back then), to let you see things
schematically, and of course somebody's come along and grafted an RSS on to the side of the Empire State Building, so it's a little different-looking, but what you
really need to be paying attention to with this one, is that
all of a sudden, we're seeing Power Feeders with
the exact same names we saw going to the goddamned
MLP in 79K10338, now going up to the top of the RSS in 79K14110!
Whole different thing.
Whole different
system.
And of course we also managed to get ourselves mixed up with all of this stupidity over on Pad
A, and between 79K04400 which built
all of Pad A, and 79K10338, which built only the FSS on Pad B, and 79K14110, which built only the RSS on Pad B, we have learned a valuable lesson, and that lesson consists in the fact that, with these different
Electrical Packages, the sonofabitches will
cheerfully use
the exact same names, for
wildly-different things, and woe unto those who are not aware of this malevolent proclivity on the part of the Electrical Designers of this crap, because the dirty bastards never say a single word about it, anywhere, and...
...careful there Lou, this thing might be
hot, and if it is,
it's gonna kill us all!
And now that we've finally put that one to bed, we can return to our original task of tracing the pathway of our F-1, F-2, and EF-1 Power Feeders up to where they get to the Cable Tray Access Catwalk at 187'-0", and head on out to the Hinge Column, and from there, across to the top of the RSS.
And luck is with us, because despite the fact that the actual
cables themselves can have reused names, of other stuff, in other places, and can, even with the same stuff, change names when you go from "here" to "there," the cable
Trays themselves, seem to maintain their names. Or at least that's the case when you go from Drawing Package 79K10338 to 79K14110, and we're going to take full advantage of that fact, because the 79K14110 drawings which show this stuff are quite a bit less well-preserved, and a lot of stuff is either faded away to nothing at all, or is "only" faded away to a state of illegibility, and
both of those two options are no damn good, so...
Let us now, step upwards through the FSS, level by level, looking at it in plan view as we go, and watch in fascination as the Cable Trays bob and weave, and morph and disappear, in a bewildering array of different permutations, as we head up the tower.
In the Department of First Things First, now that we've
finally assured ourselves that we're dealing with the
correct versions of F-1, F-2, and EF-1, we're going to need to look into things down at the root level, where a whole bouquet of these Cable Trays come sprouting up out of the ground beneath the FSS like a bunch of petunias.
79K10338 built the FSS, and it built the Cable Tunnel, and we'll need to look at those drawings first, always remembering that even though the
cables themselves get renamed bewilderingly, the Cable
Trays, keep the same exact names throughout.
And the surface of the slab covering the top of the Cable Tunnel is at Elevation 54'-0", exactly one foot above the concrete of the Pad Deck at El. 53'-0", and it's five-inch-thick steel-reinforced concrete, and I guess that oughtta be strong enough for anybody, right? See it here, on
79K10338 sheet S-9.
And we begin our Follow The Bouncing Cable Tray Journey skipping away from 79K10338, heading back to
79K14110, sheet E-10 (which by luck is of sufficient quality), just for a moment, where we start the process of learning many new things, that we never knew we didn't know, and for the moment, we're just going to sort of glance at it, and take note of the fact that it's telling us that our good friends on the F-1, F-2, and EF-1 Train are going to be taking the Cable Tray Number 9 Route, heading vertically up out of the Cable Tunnel, on their way to the top of the RSS. And the nomenclature is more than just a little obscure, but for the moment, you just have to trust me on this one, ok? The
nomenclature will get proper attention paid to it here in just a minute, I promise.
And now, armed with a proper Cable Tray
ID Number for the Route that the F-1, F-2, and EF-1 Train will be taking upwards through the FSS, we can return to
79K10338, and look at sheet E-23, to see just how our
petunias grow, coming up from underground, looking at them from a different point of view.
And please take particular notice of the words I've dropped into the drawing, in blue letters, over on the left side of it.
"Notice that each Tray in this area
(the narrow rectangles with the sort of 'X' in them),
has a little number next to it.
These are the Tray ID numbers."
We're going to need to properly understand how they
identify each cable tray on the drawings, and for the moment, it certainly seems simple enough, just spot the tray you're interested in, and take note of the little number next to it, and you're good to go. And that's exactly what we're seeing on E-23, in the area where the arrow coming off of those words is directing your attention towards.
All well and good.
So far.
Alright then, let's return to
79K14110 sheet E-10, and give
that one a second looking-over.
But this time I'm gonna
mark it up a little
differently, and show you some sneakiness that's been sitting there in plain sight the whole time, but which you were never going to be able to either notice
or understand, unless some Nice Person like me was to come along and point it out to you.
So
here's 79K14110 sheet E-10, yet again, but this time it's marked up to let you know that, out here, they even give HOLES their own specialty nomenclature.
Which, when you think about it, makes sense, because if you go threading your Cable Tray through the wrong
hole, it's very likely that Bad Things will happen as a result of it now being in the wrong
location, maybe costing you more money than you'd like spend on having to remove and reinstall it into its
correct location.
And in a place where they regularly deal with shit having the potential explosive yield of a small tactical
nuke... wayward electricity might be just a teency bit...
problematic, and yeah, let's make sure even the goddamned
holes we're punching through the grating panels and floor framing members on each FSS Level to allow vertical runs of cable tray to pass through, have all got Slot ID Letters,
too.
And of course things are
never complicated enough on their own, so we
must introduce
further complications with this crap, and one of the big additional complications is that we're dealing with a hodgepodge of new and
existing stuff, and it turns out that
most of the existing Cable Trays on the FSS, are left over from a previous bygone time, going all the way back to when they originally built the LUT for the Apollo Program in the 1960's, using drawing packages with Package Numbers that began with 75M instead of the 79K we're used to with the Space Shuttle.
Here's how our
original Trays were constructed on the original LUT, shown on
75M05121 sheet 138, and here's some more of it for you on
75M05121 sheet 139. Typical aluminum cable trays for exterior cabling runs. Nothing fancy. Covered, for blast resistance, but not for direct impingement of
rocket exhaust, or anything anywhere near as
radical as that. Sturdy covered cable trays. The usual ham and eggs. Ho hum.
And since they're
leftovers from back in 75M Ur-time, we find that with our newer sets of 79K drawing packages, they're not really all too concerned about
dimensional location for all of those existing Trays, and as a result, we find ourselves dealing with no end of plan views, and elevation views, and details, and section-cuts, and god knows what else,
none of which have any precise
location dimensions given for any of the Cable Trays we now find ourselves interested in, as we attempt to plumb the depths of all the how, why, and what, that swirls around our Cable Tray Access Catwalk up at Elevation 187'-0" as it merrily slants away from the FSS across the Struts, on it's way to...
...
nowhere!
I find this lack of
dimensional rigor very much out of character with NASA Engineering, but I guess maybe they figured, "Ok, you guys (Wilhoit)
took the damn thing apart, so you should probably be just fine with
putting it back together." But that sounds pretty bogus to me, and really, I cannot tell you why that little detail turns out to have been more or less lost in the shuffle, when you go looking at the Pad B, Task I, 79K10338 (which built the SSAT) Electrical drawings.
Or the 79K10338 Structural drawings, which also have nothing at all by way of proper dimensions for locating where all of the Cable Trays are going to be coming up through each and every Floor Framing level on the FSS (above and beyond the haphazard grouping of narrow rectangles with the little sort-of-x's in 'em to indicate that they're an
opening, over there in the southwest quadrant of the tower, near Side 3. Nary a dimension line to be found, with any of 'em. Which
gripes me, for some reason, but... oh well.
Be that as it may...
In The Beginning... (Haven't we
used that already? Yes we have. And we may not be done
reusing it just yet, either.)
There was Project
Apollo!
Back in the Days of Yore, when Retread-Nazis built Giant Rockets, all for the greater glory of... and right around here, sometimes you don't want to be looking
too closely at it, and... gee, things kinda still have an uncanny similarity to some of that stuff, even
today!
But enough about Nazis.
We're here to build the
future, not to dwell on the past!
But still...
Ok, enough of that.
We have to go all the way back to the very beginning of things, which you get a nice look at on
75M05121 sheet 1. The very first sheet in the Mechanical and Electrical Package that built the LUT which lingers on, to this very day, in remnant pieces, which we now find ourselves having to
grapple with.
And lemme tell you, that fucking LUT was
well-endowed with Cable Trays.
And we must come to terms with them, as originally built, because we're
still using 'em, decades later, on a whole different Space Program with a whole different Launch Vehicle, but including no end of pieces and parts of That Which Came Before.
Whew!
And it gets worse. It
always gets worse, doesn't it? Of course it does.
In The Beginning...
Yet again...
We find ourselves standing boots-down on an original Apollo LUT (they made
three of 'em), which was lovingly built by hand,
bespoke, back in the early 1960's, when everything was done
The Hard Way, without benefit of smartphones, personal computers, or even a goddamned pocket calculator.
Plumb bobs, tape measures, pencils, paper, and
slide rules, and maybe a desktop mechanical
adding-machine, and
that was it. That's all you get. And it was
enough! So don't fucking
whine to me about how hard you've got it, as you stand there holding your stupid-ass
phone, when some asshole fails to respond to your fucked-up
text, ok?
And on that LUT, Cable Trays came from hither, passing us by, on their way to yonder, and our interest in things Cable Trayish on their journeys hither and yon, begins with the steel deckplates we're standing upon, at Level "0" (and that's a numeral
ZERO, and not a letter in the alphabet), of the Big Box, the "Mobile Launcher" Box, and Level 0 is the upper surface of the Box, and it's just about a half-acre in extent (lotta damn steel in that Box), which makes it just about
double the size of a typical single-family-home
lot, in Florida.
And even though it says that the half-acre extent of our level is "zero," we're actually standing nearly
fifty feet (and yeah, that's just about
five stories, which I'm guessing makes it just a weency bit
higher than the roof of your
house, sitting on its lot in some blighted tract-home McMansion subdivision in Florida), above whatever ground that might be surrounding us, out on top of a Launch Pad, or over at the Park Site north of the VAB, or maybe even
inside the VAB. Nearly fifty feet up, wherever we might be, when we're standing on top of our half-acre Steel Box.
Our Cable Trays, in the darkness which fills the inside of that ridiculous Box, have been
begat in ways that are not for us to know, or even give a shit about, and have now taken on physical form, by whatever occult processes, sprouting up vertically from inside the Box, as all good petunias must grow, heading upward into the lower understory of the "Launcher Umbilical Tower," a thing which can also be called a "LUT," in and of itself, but damn near
everybody calls the whole fucking thing, Box, Tower, and all, the "LUT" and that's what we're gonna do, too.
And that
Tower vaults skyward above our disbelieving heads, all the way up to a
severely acrophobia-inducing elevation of 380 feet above us, and that's not even counting the bizarre apparition of the Hammerhead Crane that dwells atop the Tower, nor the fold-down Lightning Mast which dwells atop the Hammerhead Crane, and the whole thing presents itself as a
completely non-believable Latticework Steel Nightmare, level after level after level, reaching farther and farther upward toward the sky, far far above us, and our Cable Trays come sprouting up from the Deckplates of Level 0, right there next to us where we can
touch 'em, reaching for that first understory Level of things, and just as soon as they sprout up from their Steel Potting Soil right beside us, many of them
immediately start individually lurching off to the sides, in exceedingly
bewildering ways.
Gah.
And of course it's our unfortunate lot in life to have to
make sense of it.
The LUT has a slanted structural aspect to it, starting from Level 0, down on the Deckplates, and each succeeding Level, going upwards, gets
smaller than the Level below it, until you get to Level 80, and from then on, all the way to the top, up at Level 380, all of the Levels are the same 40' by 40' size and the same overall layout, which is also the same size and overall layout as our
FSS, which of course is what we were
originally trying to make Cable Tray Sense out of.
And on the LUT, as the Levels shrink in size, heading upwards from Level 0, the Cable Trays, which are located over near the shrinking perimeter of the structure,
MUST move with them. Must slant off at an
angle, as they too head upwards. And since that's not bad enough on its own, some of the Cable Trays slant at an angle in directions which do
not match the simple scaling of size, with each succeeding Level as we head up to Level 80, where things finally settle down and the Levels quit
changing size going from one to another, vertically.
And the goddamned
holes, the
Slots, which the Cable Trays bob and weave through, headed ever upward, must
also move, keeping step with the decreasing sizes of the Incredible Shrinking Levels, as we reach for the sky, on our way up to Level 80, where the overall structural perimeter outline of things at last decides to stay put, from there on up, all the way to the tippy top.
And it all starts out so sane, so organized, so... understandable, down on Level 0 of the LUT, where three ranks of Cable Trays, with perfectly-understandable
ID Numbers, arranged in a
proper numerical sequence, from 1 to 22, begin their Upward Journey. And
75M05121 sheet 10 lets us see just exactly how that works. And of course since
aluminum Cable Trays are not particularly well-endowed with
structural integrity, and since a
departing Saturn V is quite the
energetic event, they wisely decided to hide their Cable Trays from the worst of it, by putting 'em over there as far away from the
vehicle as they could get 'em, on the lee side of the Stair and Elevator Tower which forms the
core of the Umbilical
Tower, in the hopes that they would not receive an undue amount of damaging maltreatment at the hands of occasional bouts of very hot, and very windy,
...weather.
But just as soon as you come up off the Deck... things start
happening with our Cable Trays, and it starts getting
hairy, and
75M05121 sheet 19 tells the tale (although it certainly doesn't seem very interested in being any kind of
explicit about things, either), by letting us see how the Trays very much
fail to stay put as they proceed upward through Levels 30, 60, and 80.
So you jump waaay ahead in the drawings to
75M05121 sheet 119, which only cares about Levels 0 and 30, which doesn't seem like too much to ask, and you immediately get an
excellent look at just how
rapidly things go from "Ok, this makes sense," to...
completely out of hand, simply going from the very first LUT Level, which is Level 0, one step upward, only as far as Level 30.
Levels 30 and 60 are unique, and for the purposes of letting us know what's where, on various drawings, they give us the Tray ID Numbers, and do not appear to have bothered with
Slot ID Letters (Remember those things? From the FSS? Yeah, well, they're
coming back, so be ready for it, ok?), but once we make it as far as Level 80, it's all the same from there on up, when it comes to the generalized layout of the
Floor Framing, and from 80 on up you get Slot ID Letters on the drawings. Which is reasonable, because the Slots
stay put even as the Trays bounce and jigjog around, gradually winking out of vertical existence as they branch off horizontally to wherever it is that the cables they carry have work to do, as we get higher and higher on the tower, so they decided to use Slot ID Letters from Level 80 on up, when they built their LUT.
And as the Trays wink out of existence, so do the Slots they went through, which are no longer needed above any horizontal branch-off points, and which get covered over with steel-bar grating panels as if they'd never existed in the first place.
And this
makes a difference when we return to our FSS, which started this whole ordeal in the first place, and proper understanding of our
ordeal requires us to understand how things on the LUT became things on the FSS, and which things went where, and why they did so, and we're down there
underneath the goddamned FSS on the Pad Deck, trying to make sense of our
petunias, as they come sprouting up out of the top of the Cable Tunnel, headed for the underside of Elevation 80'-0", which is the
first proper level of the FSS, with actual
Floor Framing...
...and ok, where the hell did that Elevation 80'-0" Floor Framing on the FSS
come from, anyway?
And if we can understand
that, then, at long last, we have a fighting chance of understanding the goddamned Slot ID Letters, because we'll know their True ID Letters as they were first built... on the fucking LUT!
And on the LUT, the bottomest one of the "standard size" forty feet by forty feet
square flooring levels, the
last one you got to as you were heading
down, was Level 80, and it sure looks like, at first glance, that maybe Level 80 on the LUT, oughtta correspond to Elevation 80'-0" on the FSS, but it turns out,
that's not what happened.
Level 80 on the LUT might have been
bottomest of the "standard" 40-foot square levels, but there's a fly in the ointment with that, because, beneath Level 80 on the LUT, the
Perimeter Columns were
slanted, and that made them
completely unusable for the new FSS that was going to be growing upwards on
vertical columns, directly out of the Pad Deck concrete at Pad B.
Wilhoit chopped things up but good when they took those LUT's apart, but down at the bottom of what was going to be the new FSS, they needed
plumb, straight, vertical Perimeter Columns, and to get
that they were forced into using LUT Level 100 as a bottom level of the FSS which could possess any existing Floor Framing Steel for re-use, so as they could also re-use the
vertical columns dangling down
below it, to hold the goddamned thing up. And in fact, even with what they had,
they still had to splice an additional nearly 10 feet of purpose-built new vertical column length down at the very bottom of the existing columns, and make new Pipe Diagonals, in order to get FSS Elevation 80'-0" the requisite near thirty feet distance it would need to be, up above the Pad Deck.
Here. Look at this. Maybe this will help.
Here's a marvelously lucky image of Wilhoit building the RSS on Pad A, the one and only time they used a LUT for falsework, (you've already seen this image, and we're using it again, but this time I've altered it to remove most of the nascent RSS, Cranes, and other extraneous eye-catchers that we do not want catching our eyes), and in one and the same image, taken at the most fortuitous time possible, you get to see a
complete FSS, sitting
right next to a complete LUT. And it's those damn vertical column
legs hanging down below LUT Level 100 that they
needed, and...
took.
So.
It was LUT
Level 100 that became FSS
Elevation 80'-0", and LUT Level 100 Slot ID Letters become the
source of our FSS Elevation 80'-0" Slot ID Letters, and now we finally find ourselves coming to the hidden location from which those damnably-confusing Slot ID's down at the first Floor Framing level on our FSS
originally came from and...
...and wouldn't it be nice, right around here somewhere, to have some sort of
Rosetta Stone that we could use to get the
original LUT Slot ID Letters, and maybe use it to translate those
old Slot ID Letters over to the
new FSS Slot ID Letters, and that way we'd finally,
finally,
finally be able to put this crap to bed, for once and for all, and to resume our climb up the goddamned
FSS and try to figure out what the fuck that stupid-ass Cable Tray Access Catwalk was doing up there at Elevation 187'-0" in the first place?
Of course it would.
And as it turns out, they gave us
TWO Rosetta Stones!
Which is nice, because one of 'em is in pretty sorry shape, quality-wise, and the other one does not give us quite as much of the
information we'd really like to have (and it too, has places where the quality is... gah), but with the
two of 'em together, we actually get to figure this shit out!
75M05120 sheet 51 is the better-quality of the two, but there's still a few places where it's no damn good at all. That said, I gave it some highlighting and labeling so as you can see what it actually has to offer, without being distracted by a zillion other gubbed-up lines and small-smudgy-unknowns.
But
75M05120 sheet 137 has more information on it. And even where it's in VERY sad shape, quality-wise, you can
just about figure out what's going on with the SLOT ID Letters, and I cross-referenced things with Tray ID Numbers on the drawings that actually give them, and once you tie that stuff to the Matrix, to the
Rosetta Stone, you can gain sufficient assurance that you actually
do now know where things really live, in order to proceed with full confidence.
And then, for a proper, dead-nuts identifying of the Slot ID Letters,
I went ahead and enhanced 75M05121 sheet 137, in the area where it gives you the locations of the Slots, along with their ID Letters, and then marked that up, too, to make it that much easier for you.
We are now, at long last, dealing with this miserable shit, on its own home turf, with the correct attributions, dimensions included, for
all of it.
And we've come this far with it, so why stop here?
Let's take our newfound
rock-solid knowledge, and punch it back in to one of the isometric views of the lower part of the LUT, and paste in an accurate layout for the Cable Tray Slots, on every Level, and behold! you get
75M05120 sheet 5, and when I cooked this goddamned thing up, I was careful to make it BIG (be sure to click on it, to render it FULL size), so as you can zoom on in there, and (more or less), actually READ the fucking Slot ID Letters. And I marked it up so you can see that what
was Level 100 on the LUT,
became Elevation 80'-0" on the FSS, and then you can
refer back to any of the FSS drawings that include the Slot ID Letters for Elevation 80'-0" on the FSS, and
79K14119 sheet E-10 is one of them (and be sure you're looking at this stuff in the
Plan - El. 80'-0" view, and not the
Plan At Pad Surface El. 54'-0" view which is up above it, because,
of course, things
moved around some, in between those two elevations), and you can now (sort of) make proper
sense of that beyond-daffy "system" they used on the FSS where, on the drawings and on the corresponding Floor Plans, the Slot ID's go, in left-to-right,
bottom-to-top, "sequence" of...
...sound of breath intake and being held...
D G J
K
C F H
O
E
N
And if that isn't the most goddamnedest, most
stupidest, fucking thing in the whole
world (Donald Trump and all of his catastrophically-short-sighted greed and power crazed minions and supporters excepted), I do not have the slightest clue as to what is.
In their defense (with the Space Shuttle), they at least just went ahead and
scrapped the whole Cable Tray ID
Number nightmare which they inherited from Project Apollo in this area, and started out clean-slate with a brand new made-from-scratch
Numbering System but they managed to fuck that all up too, because they numbered the Trays in
top-to-bottom, left-to-right sequence, and that one looks like...
1 3 6
8
2 4 7
9
<--- and
this one is OUR Cable Tray, containing our best friends F-1, F-2, and EF-1!
5
10
And then you combine the two together, Tray Numbers above Slot Letters, just like they do on the 79K14110 drawings, and you get...
1 3 6
8
D G
J
K
2 4 7
9
C
F
H
O
5
10
E
N
And
now boys and girls, we finally
do see that it...
...makes sense?
Yeah, just about as much sense as electing a bought-and-paid-for Russian Asset as President of the United States makes sense.
Ah well, the River of History is beyond wide, and beyond deep, and I am only a single drop of water, and I cannot alter the course the River takes, even when I can clearly
hear the sound of a Great Cataract, dead ahead.
Sigh.
But...
Insofar as knowledge pertaining to
The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B goes...
We are now very much becoming...
...
initiates...
into
The Order of the Launch Pad, and the Mystic Secret Rites appertaining thereunto...
...and that's pretty cool, yeah?
We don't get to wear a special
ring or anything, but still...
Pretty fucking cool, if you ask me.
And now at long last we can return to the FSS for once and for all, to plumb the depths of
why that goddamned Cable Tray Access Catwalk was up there on the tower, where I was able to walk out to the far end of it, lean out over the handrail in a very unsafe (and also very
typical, for me anyway) manner, and snap the
photograph which was what set off this entire
Quest, which you have just read all the way through on this page, down to this point in the narrative where we now find ourselves looking forward along an untrodden pathway which disappears around a bend just ahead, beyond which we
still do not know what lies.
And our Catwalk was up there to give sensible access to a three-deep stack of Cable Trays, including our Cable Tray of Interest (Number 9) which was up there to get
power, both day-to-day
Industrial Power and also you-hope-you-don't-ever-need-it
Emergency Power, up to the Top of the RSS where, as I've already said, some pretty heavy-hitters dwell.
And it turns out that our Catwalk wound up at Elevation 187'-0" alongside its Cable Tray Sandwich, because that's just about as far as they could go with Things Electrical, That Lived In Cable Trays, heading upward-bound, desirous of reaching over and across to the Top of the RSS, before getting into the underside of the
Hinge Column Upper Bearing, above which there was... nothing at all.
And you very much want to stay the fuck away from that
Upper Bearing, and give it the room it
might some day need, if, god forbid, it ever needed
service. And if you
didn't, they would simply
rip your shit off the tower to get to where they needed to be, and leave it down on the Pad Deck in a pile of torched-off landfill-fodder for
you to figure out how to get it back to the way it was before it
got in their way, at your own expense, and make it snappy, because we've got a Launch Pad to operate here, and your shit had better be
working when we need it to.
So the three-deep stack of Cable Tray Crossover Platforms (
the little group of roundy sci-fi looking things wrapped around the Hinge Column, just beneath the Upper Bearing), along with the three-deep stack of Cable Trays running alongside the Catwalk, leading over to them, had to be
down a little, below where the
RSS Top Truss at Elevation 208'-2" sprouted out sideways from the Upper Bearing Outer Housing, in the form of a 24"Ø structural pipe that weighed in at a respectable 246 pounds per running foot, which was right next to another one that weighed "only" 231 pounds per running foot. And of course the Upper Bearing was holding up
one half of the 4-million pound weight of the whole RSS, and for that reason it constituted a Serious Item which you
stayed the fuck away from.
So now let's take a quick run up the FSS, level by level, plan view by plan view, on the cruddy-ass low-quality 79K14110 Electrical Drawings for this thing, just to see where our F-1, F-2, and EF-1 Power Cables, carried along by Cable Tray 9 are going, as they wend their way upward.
You've already seen
79K14110 sheet E-10, more than once even, but I'm giving it to you again, here, because I'm such a nice guy, just so as you can see all of this, starting from (beneath) the ground up.
79K14110 sheet E-11 gives it to us at Elevations 100'-0", 120'-0", and 140'-0", and as a "special" bonus, it also gives us a completely bogus Camera Platform at Elevation 100'-0" which
never existed at Pad B, and only existed at Pad A for a quite-limited time, before it got torched off the tower, and it was
originally Camera Platform 6, from LUT Level 120, which got reused for Pad A, but by the time Pad B started getting built, they'd already realized this thing was useless at best, and very much in the way at worst, and so they removed it from the tower at Pad A, and all of the engineering drawings prior to the construction of Pad B.
Well...
most of the engineering drawings prior to the construction of Pad B, anyway.
Above that, as we get to see on
79K14110 sheet E-12, we discover that things begin to get jiggy with Cable Tray 9.
It starts out calmly enough at Elevation 160'-0" by continuing to come up at us through Slot O, which it's been using all along, but at the next level up, Elevation 180'-0" (which is only seven and a half feet below our Catwalk with its Cable Tray Sandwich running alongside it), Tray 9 has suddenly jumped over to Slot Q, which is a thing we never previously suspected the existence of (yeah, it's on those LUT drawings, and I'll let you scroll back up the page, locate the link, click on the goddamned thing, and find it for yourself, just to see if you've
really been paying proper attention to this stuff).
Then, after that, E-12 shows us FSS Elevation 200'-0", which is the next level up. And
that level is
ABOVE the elevation where Cable Tray 9 has already completely jumped ship, branching off sideways across the Struts at an angle toward the Hinge Column. And at 200'-0" they're telling us the part of Tray 9 that kept right on going, upward bound, has been relocated, yet again, over to Slot U, but by then F-1, F-2, and EF-1 have lost all interest in the FSS, and they are already long gone, headed across the Struts, bound for the three-deep Deck of Crossover Platforms wrapped around the Hinge Column, and they for sure as hell
aren't stopping there, either.
And while all that's going on, Cable Tray 9 waves bye-bye to them, and continues upward on the FSS, bound for parts unknown (well... it's on the drawings, but we shall very much not be pursuing it further), and we wish it well on its continuing journey to whatever destination Fate has in store for it.
So the FSS bids a fond farewell to F-1, F-2, and EF-1, as it watches them run alongside the Catwalk, down the length of the Tray, which takes them to the Crossover at the Hinge Column, where they wrap themselves partially around it, and then enter the corresponding Tray on the Other Side, and now, at last, they're closing in on the Promised Land, because they're now on the
RSS.
See for yourself on
79K14110 sheet E-22. And this is a good drawing to verify the fact that, despite the fact that there's
three Crossover Platforms plainly visible in that Deck, our drawings only give us
two Cable Trays.
Note 2 tells us all about it: Communication crossovers are similar to power cable crossovers but cables and restraints in communication crossovers are by others (NIC). Communication tray is 24" wide Power tray is 18" wide.
And that's it, that's all you get out of 79K14110 for that one.
My guess is that I wasn't around when "by others" showed up and laid in that third Tray, above the bottom two which show on 79K14110.
I was probably down Beach Road at Complex 41 by then, battling a Dragon Most Fell, and had my hands more than full with
that crap, and... oh well. Can't be
everywhere, all the time.
And the daffiness with "Tray Count" does not stop here, either. I've got a few more tidbits up my sleeve with this damn thing. But you're gonna have to wait a few more minutes, and I can only hope you're up to the task.
But first, let's finish up with things as the F-1, F-2, and EF-1 Train comes punching in through the Hoist Equipment Room Wall to its final destination where everybody can disembark and go to work. And once they're all inside the Hoist Equipment Room, they get down to business and feed their considerable electrical power into the big Electrical Distribution Boxes in there. And that Electrical Distribution stuff is what parcels power out to no end of things we should already be well-familiar with, like the 90-ton Payload Hoist, the LRU Hoist, the PGHM, the PCR Elevator, the Side Seal Panels, multiple RSS Monorail Hoists (including
the big one which was never installed, that dictated the existence of the
Monorail Transfer Doors that we wound up welding shut), no end of Lighting and Power Recepticals, about a million pumps and fans, and a
lot of other stuff, too.
79K14110 sheet E-15 lets you see how the Feeders wind their way along, horizontally and vertically (note the elevations they give us, along the way), until they enter the Hoist Equipment Room, and one-by-one disappear into their respective Power Distribution Boxes, ready to roll up their sleeves and get down to the serious business of
making things go, all over the goddamned place on the RSS.
You are now considered competent enough with this stuff to make sensible use of where parts of it can be seen, on
Image 046, which you first encountered on
Page 1 of this thing, and which you encountered a second time on
Page 44, where I tried (and failed miserably in the attempt) to tell you what it
felt like to be out there on the end of the Hammerhead Crane, looking back and down at the
towers, and then again, for a
third time, on
Page 45, where I tried to explain a lot of what you were
seeing, with my main focus being the Orbiter Access Arm, and the iron from which it was hung, and with which it
interacted.
And because The Fates deem it so, we
also got an excellent look at where F-1, F-2, and EF-1 come punching in through the Hoist Equipment Room Wall, way back on
Page 10, when I was still so fresh, and so new, and so
very inexperienced with all this stuff, and had
no fucking idea what I was looking at, or what I was dealing with, and
Image 009 lets us see, clearly, that last bit of things where three Stanchions were already installed, ready to support a Cable Tray which was nowhere to be seen at the time, which would carry F-1, F-2, and EF-1 to their final destinations.
Now. About that "daffiness with Tray Count"...
They made a 79K14110 (which of course is what we used to actually
build the goddamned RSS) isometric of both towers in the Electrical Package, just for the Cable Trays. I was going to show you this one first, or nearly first, except that once I started actually
looking at it, I discovered that might not be such a good idea.
It looks just fine at first glance.
But then, when you start trying to follow individual Trays, you discover that it's in serious disagreement with the 79K14110 Structural Package, and it's also in plain, sneakey, and multifarious combination, disagreement with what you can see in Image 046, which of course is what actually got
built.
So I needed to take you for the
Full Walk Through the Dark Forest, before I could show you this thing, or otherwise you'd get lost and the wolves would
eat you.
So here you go,
79K14110 sheet E-9, showing us the whole schmutz, end-to-end, except that...
It ain't none all so very
accurate, in too many places to enumerate.
Compare it with Image 046, keeping in mind that Image 046 cannot show us
everything, because there's one hell of a lot of intervening iron blocking Trays from view, so we can presume that there's even
more disagreements, which we're not gonna be seeing, right?
And yeah, there's some significant
interestingness to be found, and it causes us to wonder how a thing like that might have come to be, especially from a group of sharp people who were employed by
NASA at the time.
And with first things first, we need to understand that 79K14110 sheet E-9 is a
Wash-Off, taken from an
original which was created for Pad A. And this is
not the time to delve into the
history of how engineering drawings were produced at the time, but suffice it to say that it was all
hand-made. Every last bit of it.
In this narrative, you are, perhaps without realizing it, looking at a
Lost World, wherein everything was done by hand, and you are also looking at
the very last bit of it, right on the
cusp, just before computers became ubiquitious and everything started getting done using CAD Software at a computer
workstation.
Maybe stop a moment and consider that.
Hand Made. Allofit. In a bygone world which the sun will never rise upon, ever again.
And so, in order to
understand 79K
14110 sheet E-9, with
"Original Date Of Drawing 12-12-78" (they were all getting ready for Christmas at the time, and I was the still-bewildered father of a one-year old, who turned out to be The Light and The Rudder of my life) down in the Title Block, we must go and look at 79K
04400 sheet E-28, with "Original Date Of Drawing 3-31-7
5" (my third of four winters riding big waves on the North Shore of Oahu was winding down), making it over well over
three years older than its Pad B 79K14110 incarnation.
So here's Pad
A drawing
79K04400 sheet E-28, all nice and marked-up for you, and...
Hmm...
And up in the Rev Block, we see Revision 'E', dated 2-2-76, and although it's difficult to pick up, all the way around, the Rev Cloud for that one covers
everything on the RSS, all the way over to the Hinge Column, and...
Who the fuck knows what the
original original of this thing looked like, and maybe one day I'll get to see it, and if I do, I'll be sure to come back here and fix this up accordingly, but please do not hold your breath on it, because if you do, you'll
die.
The same two Power Feeders are in that Tray, but their Numbers have changed (we already knew that, having had to deal with Pad A 79K04400 Feeders F-1 and F-2 taking power to the MLP instead of up to the top of the RSS, becoming F-3 and F-4 as they did so, because... fuck you), even though the
Tray number didn't (and no, I'm
not going get into it and have to show you another hundred goddamned drawings in the process, but it's
there).
As for our
Emergency Power Feeder (EF-1 on 79K14110), they did things totally
different on Pad A, and its corresponding Emergency Power Feeder is EF-8. And of course that
can't be enough trouble
all by itself, and so they ran
that goddamned thing up out of the Cable Tunnel into the underbelly of the tower through a completely different Cable Tray, it being Number
8, coming up out of the ground beneath the FSS along with all the
other petunias.
But somewhere along the line, (down low somewhere on the FSS, I
think, but I have yet to
find it) they jumped EF-8 over to Tray 9 to live with F-11 and F-12 as a nice
triplet, just like on Pad
B, and the reason I say that is because on
79K04400 sheet E-30, they've got all three of 'em in
the same Tray, inside of the Hoist Equipment Room similar to Pad B, and I offer no explanation, no wild-ass guess, no nothing. Make of it what you will, noticing the
substantial differences between things in general, and the innards of the Hoist Equipment Room
in particular, between Pad B 79K14110
E-15, and Pad A 79K04400
E-30 as you do so.
And the next time some dim-bulb dipshit tries to tell you that both pads were
identical twins...
Well...
You are hereby authorized to place said dim-bulb dipshit on the list of Known Idiots, and are further encouraged to not engage them in discussion about it, because these kinds of people can only double-down, and are only interested in the
appearance of Having Knowledge, as opposed to the actual
having of it, and the fact that they are clearly unable to
distinguish between the two, is ample-enough evidence of thier utter lack of worthiness of an investment of your own time, in attempting to take them a little farther along The Path, beyond the ditch you found them upside-down in, trying to tell everybody they didn't do it.
From where we now stand, with the incarnation of 79K04400 that was
given us, about all we can do is marvel at the fact that
both Crossover Decks disagree with 79K14110, and up top, they gave us
two extra ones, and down below, they took one away, and it can't matter
anyway because
none of this stuff agrees with what we're seeing with our own eyes in Image 046, and about all I have to add to things at this point, is what we have here is quite the Cautionary Tale, letting us know (as if we didn't already) that this stuff tends to shift around on us, and you give that some consideration, and then you look at people
climbing inside the goddamned Space Shuttle, and you know for a fact that they knew how things
shifted around too, and...
Those were some pretty fucking
brave people, betting their
lives on this stuff being
right...
...and not
everybody came home, every time, and...