The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 2: Introductory Background Page 2 of 5 - An Arrival at the Pad.
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Doesn't look like very much, does it?
You're going to need some background for this one.
You're going to need to understand what this image is, and why it's here as the first image you see.
Very well then, the background. The story that comes before the story.
Somehow, I had managed to get all the way through high school, and graduated from Satellite High, in Satellite Beach, Florida, in 1969, but in truth I was deeply uneducated, and held a poor attitude about all such things and in particular, the people who ran those sorts of systems. It was, after all, the 1960's. You may research the 1960's for yourself, if you'd like. I'm sure you'll discover many strange and wonderful things which occurred during that time.
In the late 1970's I had returned home to Florida after spending four winters on the North Shore of Oahu, riding large waves as a pretty hard-core surfbum. I had gotten married (didn't last), and had a child (best
A more unqualified person for what was about to occur, you would be very hard-pressed to find.
Up at the beach, I used to hang out with a crew of surfers, and one day one of them, Richie Walls, told me his dad worked out on the Cape, needed help, and would I be interested in maybe working for him?
I'm pretty sure I said "Yes," before he was even done asking the question fully. I had no idea who his dad was, or what he might be doing out there on the Cape. A hidden door had suddenly cracked open, and I dove through it without having the faintest idea as to what might be on the other side. The door slammed shut behind me and never opened again.
And so it came to pass, on St. Patrick's day, 1980, I found myself at a launch pad sitting in the chair from which the above rough sketch was made only a few months later, looking to the northeast, out from inside of Sheffield Steel's jobsite field trailer, over Wilhoit's field trailer, at the growing steel structure of the RSS, climbing piece by piece into the sky adjacent to the FSS, on my first day at the new job, a job for which there were apparently no qualifications of any kind required, above and beyond merely being alive and not asleep during work hours.
I was an answering machine. I was a telephone number's voicemail.
That's all. Nothing more was required of me above and beyond my sitting there in that chair, and picking up the handset on a black rotary-dial telephone, whenever it rang, if my boss wasn't in the trailer to answer it himself.
Imagine that!
Things have changed, a lot, since then, and for some people it's hard to imagine a time without the pervasive all-encompassing web of communication devices and infrastructure that surrounds and touches everyone, at all times, which presses down imperceptibly, but profoundly, upon us all.
Back in those days, if you wanted to get hold of somebody, you either paid them a personal visit, or you called them up on a phone that was hard-wired to the wall in a room somewhere, and if they weren't in the room when you called, there wasn't any way to reach them, to leave them a message, to do anything at all, except to try again later.
My boss, Dick Walls, was the sole representative for Sheffield Steel at Launch Complex 39-B, and whenever somebody needed to get hold of him, it was usually for a good reason, and it was also usually something that needed to get dealt with NOW, lest it wind up costing somebody a LOT of money per hour, while a clock somewhere relentlessly kept on ticking.
Answering machines did not exist. No voicemail. No nothing. Just black rotary-dial phones ringing futilely in empty rooms.
The prime contractor on the job got good and sick of that shit pretty quick, and informed Sheffield Steel, the provider of all the structural steel which the pad was being constructed from, that they had better get somebody in that goddamned field trailer, right now, to pick up the goddamned phone when it rang, and go physically hunt down Dick Walls to get him to deal with whatever emergent problem the phone call represented, or there would be hell to pay.
And so, they needed a warm body to occupy that chair next to the phone.
Impossibly, not one, but two of my surf buddies down at the beach, had been tapped for this job previously, and both of them had flunked out!
Can you imagine being too useless to handle sitting in a chair and answering a phone when it rang?
To literally not qualify for successfully answering a goddamned phone?!?
Impossible!
But true.
And so, The Fates decreed that James MacLaren be the third guy to occupy that chair and answer the goddamned fucking phone when it rang, so as Pat Costello of the Frank Briscoe Corporation would not fly into yet another rage and put more holes in the walls of his own field trailer with his bare fists.
But, very much unlike his predecessors, James MacLaren was profoundly interested in what was going on all around him.
James MacLaren was working at a goddamned Moon Rocket launch pad, right in the middle of getting it ready for what was to follow, getting it ready to launch goddamned Space Shuttles for god's sake, and there was no way any of it was going to get past him if he had anything at all to say about it!
And I guess, in the end, that's what it all comes down to: Are you interested?
Can you bring yourself to become interested?
Can you bring yourself to become interested in something worthy? Something that rises above the endless landscape of banal self-serving entertainments and advantage-taking which no end of low-energy people fill all the days of their lives with?
If so, then things will happen.
And if not, then things won't happen.
And holy shit, but did an awful lot of things happen after I sat my skinny little butt down in that chair for the first time!
I had no idea what was coming.
Nor did I care in the slightest.
Just let it come!
And so it did.
The image you see above is the very earliest visual representation of the pad that we have, which was created by myself.
It was created by a pair of very idle hands during yet another one of those stretches of excruciating tedium that occurred during the hours spent sitting in that chair which crept slowly by without any incoming phone calls, during my earliest months on the job, as things were still imperceptibly starting to slowly gather up steam, before things really started happening.
It was June, 1980.
The sketch was created before I had yet to begin bringing my camera to the pad, and taking photographs with it. Soon, but not yet. Surreptitiously at first (I am a risk-taker, it is in my blood somehow), and then later with an official NASA Camera Permit. But it wasn't long before I took a chance with the camera, and the very first results with the camera will follow, and will serve to help explain what it is that you're seeing in the crude sketch at the top of this page, and will serve as your introduction to the whole system, will serve to show you what it's made of, and why, in the same fashion that I learned it, piece by piece, item by item.
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