The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B

A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.

Page 67: GOX Arm Beanie Cap Lift plus A Bunch of Junky Stuff Near the Top of the FSS.

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Out on the Pad, nobody ever called it the "GOX Vent Hood." Nor did anybody ever call it the "GOX Vent Tip Assembly."

It's was always, without exception, referred to as the "Beanie Cap."

But I always thought they should call it the "Flying Saucer" because that exactly what it looked like.

Straight out of a sci-fi movie.

And it even had a nice handrail where the aliens could stand behind it and wave to you as they flew by.

It had it's own 79K number for Pad B, 79K26351, but I've never been able to lay hands on that set of drawings, alas. My guess is that they're pretty interesting, 'cause this thing was complicated.

Quite the gizmo.

And if you look at that framework to the left of the white flying-saucer part of what's being lifted in our photograph, you can maybe start to get an idea of just how complicated this thing was, in between where the far-left side of the framework bolts on to the end of the GOX Arm (more aircraft bolts, natch), and where the Flying Saucer part of it starts. That framework in there is not particularly large, but it's well-packed with stuff, and what you're seeing in this image is the bare-bones configuration, which means there will be more, before all is said and done, and it's completely-ready to do its job.

And of course it was the GOX Arm, which we just got finished hanging on the tower, which swings this thing out and away from the FSS when it's in its stowed position, taking it out away from the tower, to a place directly above the External Tank, where it can do its job of trying to keep everybody from getting killed during launch or re-entry, but that Arm all by itself is not enough.

Where the Flying Saucer fits down over the top of the Tank, is a pretty close-tolerance location, and the Space Shuttle's final location as it sits on its MLP, which itself sits on the Pad MLP Mount Mechanisms, moves around a little bit, every time they park it up on the Pad Deck. Never quite the same place twice.

So it's never in exactly the same place, ok?

Which is not to say that it goes wandering around all over the goddamned Launch Pad, and they have to send somebody out with a lasso to catch it and bring it back, but it does move around in its parked position, just a little bit.

The Tank also lengthens and shortens owing to significant thermal expansion and contraction depending on whether it's empty, or partially-loaded, or fully-loaded with Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen.

And when the wind blows, the goddamned Tank moves around because of that, too. It bends and flexes a small (but not so small you can ignore it) amount under wind-loads.

And that white Vent Hood must be able to accommodate every last one of those small variations in the exact location of where the tippy-top of the External Tank winds up, and of course that has to be done mechanically, and maybe now you can start to see how this thing's gotta be located dead-nuts right where it belongs, so as it has enough positional margin to accommodate all of those differing locational excursions which our unexpectedly-mobile External Tank might perchance wind up occupying, without running the risk of things going metal-on-metal as it does so, while still-yet being close enough that the goddamned seals will still work, and not become detached.

In-and-out.

Up-and-down.

Side-to-side.

And oh yeah, it's gotta be dead-nuts level, too.

Lotta goddamned shit going on with the location of that fucked-up Flying Saucer, and every last bit of it's gotta be rock-solid, immovably in place, once it's reached its one-and-only correct location where it gets put to work each time.

And they don't want to fuck it all up and get it wrong, so all of a sudden you find yourself grappling with a Big Deal when it comes to adjusting this thing each time a Shuttle is rolled out to the Pad, and you're playing for keepsies every single time, with no fuckups allowed.

Lower that Hood down in the wrong place and you run a very real risk of breaking the External Tank.

Raise the Hood back up and swing it away from the Tank on Launch Day, and you run additional risks of fucking everything up way worse.

Bang into the Tank with this thing, on Launch Day, mere minutes before T-minus zero when you're retracting it, with a full load of outrageously flammable and explosive propellants in the Tank, and a fucking Crew inside the Orbiter...

And...

Nah... we're not gonna be letting any goddamned shit like that happen. Ever.

And all of a sudden, you can see that we're going to be designing ourselves a remarkably robust, and remarkably fine-tuned, and remarkably adjustable gizmo that's gonna be hanging off the end of the GOX Arm. Structural! Mechanical! Electrical! You betcha!

And of course this thing is only for Oxygen, but the External Tank is loaded to the gills with Liquid Hydrogen too, but we're going to have to use a wholly-separate Umbilical for that, and yes, we're gonna get to that here soon enough, but not right now, ok?

Just Oxygen, for now. Nothing else.

And we haven't even started in on what happens with the GOX (wafting by at a balmy 294 degrees below zero Fahrenheit) as it comes out of the Vent Louvers up at the top of the ET.

Whole 'nother series of convolute and contrapted conundrums.

Which all have to be solved, lest we...

Lose control of things.

So ok, so what's going on in the photograph?

Harvey Dixon is over there in the bottom-right corner of the frame hanging on to the tag line that's tied to the Flying Saucer, and he looks to be holding on to it pretty tightly too.

For no reason at all, other than to be right in the middle of things.

Harvey was Wade's right-hand man. He was, more or less, Wade's "fixer." And he was a good enough ironworker, but nowhere near as good as Rink, and there was always this subsurface tension between the two, with Harvey never quite being happy about how things had shaken out, pushed off to the side by Reynsol Chiles, who had been chosen by Wade to be the General Foreman on a large and exceptionally complicated and difficult job, and who kept it all going, with a keen eye and a deft touch, although maybe not being the most cheerful and agreeable person in the world while doing so.

Rink would occasionally roll his eyes and drawl with a certain "tone" in his voice, when he saw Harvey doing something like this, "He don't need to be there." And it was true. Working the tag line was is not considered foreman work. Not even close, in fact. Apprentices get put on tag lines. And yet...

...there he is, dead-center, right in the middle of things, quite-literally attached to the Lift.

...on the tag line.

While Rink, completely out of view elsewhere, was actually running the Lift.

Maybe go back to Page 62 and give those photographs another looking-at. Look for Rink with his yellow hardhat, Wade with a dark-blue hardhat, and Harvey in his white hardhat.

Watch what's actually going on with those three as things unfold on the ground, and once the Strongback is properly off the ground, and then, when it's up at the top of the FSS, look to see if Harvey is even there.

The story is told, wordlessly.

Rink is running the lift, and Wade is right there, and Harvey... not so much.

And I know for a fact that it rankled him to have not been chosen by Wade to do what Rink (who may have been 20 full years younger than Harvey) was doing, running the whole job. But Wade was, if nothing else, pragmatic, and it was his money on the line, and he was, by god, going to be damn good and sure he had the best guy running the whole job.

Harvey's main talents lied elsewhere, and his bond with Wade was as tight as it gets...

But he was a "fixer" by nature, and that's a little bit different, and...

It was just about as fascinating as hell to watch the dynamic as it played out every day.

The Tip Assembly has come up off of its support cribbing, suspended beneath its purpose-designed four-legged lifting sling, which itself is being picked up by the whip line coming down to the headache ball from the big Manitowoc's rooster sheave since it's so light. No need for the main load hook on the crane for this Lift.

Directly beneath where the Flying Saucer connects with the End Assembly of the Arm, where all the mechanical stuff for controlling the Saucer is, you can see Howard Baxter standing in front of his TTV Trailer, arm outstretched with what looks like a clenched fist, and he seems to be communicating with a guy over at the left end of the trailer, hand up to block the sun, maybe not wearing a hardhat, looking back at Howard, and I'm guessing that Howard is letting him know that whatever it is that he's got going on over there is good, right where it is, so stop, and hold in place.

I have no proof, but my gut feeling is that TT&V were quite involved with the GOX Vent Hood stuff, maybe being the ones who initially took possession of it when it was delivered to the Pad from wherever and whoever fabricated the damn thing (I do not know), and as such bore significant responsibility for it, not only for receiving inspection, but also the care and feeding of it for the duration of its tenure in their possession, and Howard being Howard, nothing was going to be left to chance, and if anybody so much as farted in the general direction of this stuff, he was going to be in charge of it, all the way down to the fine detail of having it placed directly in front of his trailer, where all he had to do was look out his window to see it. Howard was a thorough sonofabitch, and never missed a thing in all the time I knew and interacted with him. Do your job, and he's your best friend. But if you fuck it up... look out.

Far left of the image, down low, one end of it in front of the guy who might be receiving instructions from Howard, and the other end extending out of frame to the left, a bit of the GOX Vent Duct is visible, held up on some kind of U-shaped deal or other, most likely padded, 'cause these ducts were never intended to be any kind of strong. Light and efficient, we'll give you, but strong? No. We'll let whatever's supporting it be the strong part.

Here's another look at 79K24048 sheet M-350 with labels, to give you an idea of where all this crap goes, in the larger scheme of things. You look at that drawing, and... ok, sure, whatever... but then you look back at the photograph, especially the GOX Vent Duct laying there with people around it...

And suddenly the scale of things kind of jumps out at you and you realize that the whole place, and everything in it...

...was GIANT.

Everything was outsize.

Fucking ducts, same stuff exactly as what takes the central heat and air through your attic and distributes it to all the rooms in your house, turns out to be bigger than a car, and that's just one small piece of it, and...

Outsize.

Everything was outsize.

And you're immersed in it. Day after day after day. And it sort of fades on you. Except that, every once in a while, it would hit you again, and astonish you again with just how fucking weirdly-big everything was.

Which was kind of a fun sensation to tell the truth, and quite pleasurable whenever it hit me.

But you have to put your head right back down, and go right back to work, and you put your gobsmacked astonishment away, once again, lest it interfere with what you're doing. And maybe hurt you.

There's not a whole lot more to add as regards our photograph, with the possible exception of making sure we're oriented with respect to our location, and that's easily-enough ascertained by looking directly below Howard Baxter, where you can see the curved Rail Beam which carries the RSS across the Flame Trench coming in from out of frame below, to where it meets the East Wall of the Flame Trench with the pair of curving rails continuing on across the Pad Deck over there, to where they disappear behind crated I-don't-know-whats directly beneath the GOX Vent Duct laying there on its supports.

Which puts us on the west side of the Flame Trench, looking east, with the RSS directly behind us, and the FSS behind us over our left shoulder.

Just so you know, ok?


And this is such a fun picture, I don't even know where to start with it.

Flying Saucer hovers low over America's Space Center!!!

Never before seen photographic evidence that NASA has suppressed for decades, REVEALED!!!

Steal this image and send it to your conspiracy-nitwit friends, acquaintances, and family members.

NASA Secrets that they never wanted you to know about!!!

Proof of NASA collaboration with ALIENS!!!

Oh god, every time I look at this image, I can hear them all shrieking to each other, and I start cracking up all over again.

Buncha fucking stupid-ass idiots.

And yeah, the thought of this thing looking exactly like a goddamned flying saucer very much was in my mind as I hit the shutter release for this photograph, but never in my wildest dreams did I think that I'd hit it so squarely. So perfectly.

Where's the Lifting Sling?

Where's the headache ball?

Where's the whip line coming down from out of frame up above?

Hell, even the crane boom manages to nearly disappear, and even when you see it, it in no way appears involved with the white conical apparition hovering low over the Flame Trench.

People in the background getting into the act? Of course! Not a single person is looking at this thing. No witnesses! A more perfect Flying Saucer picture you'd have trouble even imagining.

The GOX Vent Hood in no way visually connects to the steel framework that's holding it up, which instead blends in perfectly with the snarl of steel structure behind it. Structural steel, once again, performs its fantastic trompe l'oeil, and makes you see things, makes you believe things, that can never be true.

That fucking Beanie Cap is, goddamnit, floating in space, all alone, attached to nothing, with the FSS behind it.

Amazing!

ALIENS!!!

Aliens took America's Apollo astronauts to the MOON, and I have PROOF!!!

Aaiieeeaarrrhggghh!

And I'm not feeling very technical right now this morning as I write these words, and instead, I'm going to head off in an entirely different direction with this photograph, and that direction is going to be toward The Land of Art, and in particular Modern Art, and that's still a pretty vast district, so I'm going to further narrow it down to Cubism.

This photograph stands well from a composition point of view, and the subject matter of the overall composition, is just about as Cubist as it gets.

The RSS, Conjoined Twin of the FSS, by virtue of its own non-rectilinear shape and orientation vis-à-vis its inseparable twin, defeats visual perspective, forcing consideration of the image from other viewpoints. The latticework of the crane boom only serves to fragment things further.

The great sweep of darkness that runs diagonally downward across the center of the frame is chopped and cut and sliced and fragmented into a bewilderment of very straight lines with just the barest little sprinkling of curves tossed in with it, all juxtaposed one on top of another and another and another, and the overall effect here is very evocative of what those people who began the Movement during the first decade of the 1900's were seeing all around them, and then took the radical step of depicting it in ways that had never before been considered, and at the time, it was fucking radical, and to this day it still evokes strong reactions in people, both for and against, and... Cubism.

It's never going to be confused with Nude Descending a Staircase of course, but if you think this aspect of things was not in my mind when I took this photograph back in the early 1980's, you'd be wrong. It was a whole separate world of astoundment and amazement being able to see things all around me at the Pad every day from this perspective. It was an entire separate and distinct dimension to things, which I was somehow gifted the ability to sense, in addition to all the other dimensions to it which I was sensing simultaneously, and the Artistic dimension, all by itself, is sufficiently vast as to permit it to be endlessly subdivided and considered from differing and never-ending points of view, Cubism being only a single one of them, and bearing little to no resemblance to any of the others. To call the experience "rich" is to beggar it, and I long long ago utterly gave up on attempts to instill it into those who cannot already see it without first being told to look for it. Worlds inside of worlds inside of worlds. All wholly separate. All superimposed within and upon each other. Endlessly. It's either there or it's not, and there's not a damn thing in the world I can do about it. But, that said, I'll not keep quiet about it, either. It's worthy stuff.

And also, the thought of the Towers on top of the Pad as bizarrely-enormous objets d'art, rendered by a host of crazed Surrealists in the manner of Cubism, just tickles the shit out of me somehow, too.

And without missing a beat, we'll switch from High Art to High Fear.

Life-threatening fear, in fact. The fear of death. Which is the greatest fear of all, and it pierces your heart like a red-hot lance in a way that no other fear can ever come close to.

Click on the photograph to bring it up full size.

Top-right corner.

What's going on up there?

This is the area where the Intertank Access Arm is going to be bolted to the FSS. And we've got really good photographs of that Lift too, but... not yet. Not now.

But it's a big sonofabitch. Hulking motherfucker, in fact.

Also, you've already seen it, but I did not draw it to your attention at the time. Go back one page to Page 66, scroll down to the second-to-last photograph down there near the bottom of the page, and give Image 115 a click to bring it up full-size.

Bottom-right corner. Down there underneath the Lower GOX Arm Hinge Access Platform in the far distance, down there on the ground. Crummy rendering. Overexposed. So far away as to look like a child's toy. But that's it, sitting there on its transporter, which is parked on the concrete at the old Apollo Flame Deflector Park site north of the Flame Trench, which you can see here on 79K10338 sheet C-9. Thirty feet tall, not quite twenty feet wide, and just about thirty-eight feet long. Weight given on 79K24048 sheet M-336 was 100,500 pounds. Fucking monster. And it hung off the side of the FSS, completely cantilevered out there with nothing underneath it to hold it up, so the four main connection points where it was tied to the tower were quite robust, and in our photograph above these words, there's a float hanging at each one of those four connection points, and work is ongoing, getting things ready.

Top-right connection point.

Look close.

There's a dark blob of a shape silhouetted against the sky directly above that float.

Look close.

That's his foot there, in the air, intersecting the dark thread of the rope which is attached to the far-right corner of the float, holding it up.

And by purest luck, we've caught him in motion, in the middle of doing his job, coming up from over the side, getting off of that goddamned flimsy, wobbly, woefully-insubstantial motherfucking float, held up by nothing more than a few lousy ropes, dangling directly above the wide-open jaws of cold-eyed death.

There's a Lift under way, and it's about to be getting above him, and it's now time to get out of there.

Now back out on the image again, now that you know exactly what that amorphous dark shape really is, up there.

Look at the fucking distance.

To the fucking ground.

Ironworkers.

Union Motherfucking Ironworkers, doing their job.

And lemme tell you, when it's you that's in the middle of going over the side...

You'll feel it.

Except that, of course, none of you ever will, because none of you will ever get anywhere near any place where you wind up going over the side to get to your goddamned job.

Stop reading this. Stare at that fucking picture for a while with a man over the side up there, and give it the consideration which it is due.

I'm trying my best to bring you understanding, but in the end, it's up to you. You'll either feel it, or you won't, and there's not a goddamned thing I can do about it, either way.

But... for some of you who are not feeling it, this might be a teachable moment.

A moment to teach you about yourself, and the way you fit in with everyone around you.

Who all seem to keep returning to places which bring misfortune to you. Who are always doing things you'd rather they not do.

And it's because they can sense your lack of feeling, and they instinctively understand that without proper feeling, you can be expected to place them in situations that can, and will, hurt them, and one of the reasons you do so is because you yourself are always very careful to keep yourself out of those situations, feeling no hurt yourself, and feeling neither hurt nor even the slightest unease, and occasionally even pleasure when someone else takes a fall.

You are missing something, and people around you will sense it, and rightly perceive you for the threat to their own health and well-being that you are.

And of course, some of you unfeeling ones are immediately engaged in mimicking the sensations and outward appearances of feeling, telling yourselves that you really do feel it, ready to go and persuade everyone else of that falsehood, the better to fit in, and do whatever it is you do on a regular and reliable basis.

Go right ahead. Lie to yourself. Lie to the people all around you. It's what you do anyway, so why stop now?

And not everyone will pick up the faint signals you give off.

Not everyone will see through it.

And those are the ones you will continue to work as you go about the affairs of your day-to-day life.

But the rest of us?

No. We're going to see and we're going to take measures.

Against you, against your lies, and against the hidden and very real threat which you constitute.

And as for yourself?

Well...


Pretty much the exact same photograph as the previous one, except that I managed to hold the camera a little more upright, and the vertical elements in the center of the frame are now more properly vertical, but still not entirely so. That, and a Flying Saucer which has risen back up away from the Pad Deck, presumably on its way to a rendezvous with an unseen Mothership hidden from view elsewhere in the sky someplace.

The underside of the Saucer has now come into view, and we can definitely see something up underneath there, and we'll get into that end of things in the next, and final, image in the sequence, but for now we'll let it be an opening for the tractor beam that shines down out of it to the ground, sucking up the unwary, and taking them away to a place that nobody's ever been to.

In this image, as opposed to the previous one, you can, just barely pick out the faintest-imaginable traces of some of the lifting gear that's pulling our Flying Saucer skyward. But to call those traces "faint" is to laughably understate the meaning of that word to the point of nonsense. Once again, as with the previous photograph, the headache ball in particular has wound up with a dazzle camouflage background directly behind it sharing elements having pretty much the exact same value and coloration (yes, the ball really is red, but no, not in this woefully-degraded image which has been slowly accumulating color-cast damage for over four decades, so... oh well), rendering it pretty much invisible, and of course the ball is the largest and most distinct part of the lifting gear, which means the rest of it is... not going to be easy for you to find.

And we're doing a little better with the support framework that holds all the mechanical doodads for moving and adjusting the location of the Vent Hood, but only for that part of it which is painted white, and all the rest of it, the gray part, continues to disappear against its background like a tiger disappearing into a background of tall grass. It's there... but... "Here little antelope. Come here. This is good grass. Come and eat your fill of this good grass. There's no tiger in this grass. You'll be fine." Uh... maybe.

Maybe not, too.

On the ground, immediately left of the base of the FSS, it looks like a group of three people over there, with one of 'em holding the tag line, but that's not what's happening at all. The tag line is coming off the left side of the Flying Saucer, and extends down and leftward till it exits the frame midway down the left side after passing directly in front of the crane's Load Hook which has been stowed out of the way up against the boom for the duration of this lift. Whether Harvey Dixon is still on the ground end of that tagline I have nary a clue.

What those three people are actually doing over there, I cannot know, nor can I know what that is arcing up and away from them to the right, toward the FSS, that looks like a tag line but isn't. But it's most likely either an air line, or maybe some kind of fluids line, and that just might be the case, since there's a trailer over there to the south of those guys carrying a couple of large round tanks supported in a fairly light steel framework, and that's very definitely looking like fluid gear, of some sort or another.

And what might anybody be wanting to do with a couple of big tanks of Mystery Fluid up here?

Well...

We've already learned that the mechanical trades were well along with the installation of the Centaur Vacuum-Jacketed Lines by this time, and the Centaur Porch, up there just above the 120'-0" level, straddling the Struts between the FSS and the RSS, is where a lot of that VJ Line stuff wound up going...

And those lines always needed to be Pickled, and then Passivated immediately following their initial installation. And those two terms are separate things, but every time I've ever crossed paths with them in my life, it's always been "pickling and passivation" or "pickled and passivated" and if you get one, you always seem to get the other. And oh yeah, that term, "Pickled and Passivated" always strikes me as in some strange way to be silly, and I find myself suppressing a brain-dead smirk every time I hear it for some reason, but I'm sure that's just me. I do recall the first time I crossed paths with this terminology, very early on, when I was still just an answering machine in the Sheffield Steel field trailer, and I distinctly remember thinking to myself, "The fuck? What the fuck is that?" but I held my tongue, and for about the only time in my life, I did not make a fool of myself by blurting out something stupid in a room otherwise occupied by intelligent people.

Give those two specs I just linked to a bit of a looking over, and then look back at those tanks sitting there on the Pad Deck with those people next to them, and... I do not know in the slightest if that's what's in those tanks, but it very well could be... and... some of that stuff ain't none too "user friendly" so once again, you gotta mind. You gotta mind where you are and you gotta mind what you're dealing with, and... yeah.

The place wants to kill you.

Every chance it gets.

And it turns out that it gets a lot of chances.


Last frame in the four-shot series, and we're just about to connect the Tip Assembly to the end of the Arm.

Viewed from below, we can now get a (pretty crummy, actually, but just barely good enough) look at the inflatable seals which live on the underside of the Flying Saucer, and those things needed to fit snugly around the External Tank's Gaseous Oxygen Vents on either side of the Tank, up at the very top of it, in order for the system to work.

We can once again return to our documentation of this stuff, Space Shuttle External Tank Gaseous Oxygen Vent System, by William G. Franklin, and take another look at it, now that we've had a chance to see this thing from several different perspectives as it was being Lifted, giving us a better feel for things, overall.

And down near the bottom of that document we get a pretty good cutaway view of the Vent Hood in Figure 2. Vent Hood Cutaway Showing Vent Seals and Interface With ET.

And yeah, that's a pretty goddamned busy image right there. Lotta shit going on in that drawing.

And the sense of things is that they grab some of the Gaseous Nitrogen (GN2) which the Launch Pad is well-endowed with and pipe it up to the top of the FSS where they run it through a heater, and it comes out of the heater at "355°K" and for those of you who don't speak Kelvin, that's 179.33 °F, and for those of you in the Civilized World, that's 81.85 °C, and that's pretty damned hot, but it's not quite hot enough to boil water with (down here at sea level, anyway), and they run it through a duct out to the end of the Arm where it gets pushed down into the top of the Beanie Cap, and from there it kind of gets taken all over the place, including the pair of Inflatable Seals which hang from the underside of the Vent Hood like you're seeing them in our photograph above these words, one for each GOX Vent on the ET, which the heated GN2 pushes on the insides of, and forces them into their extended configuration where they rest snugly against the outside surface of the ET, all around each Vent, and as the stupidly-cold GOX comes out of those Vents it immediately gets mixed, diluted, and warmed by the heated GN2 which is coming out of vent holes in the Inflatable Seals, and the Seals take it directly to the two large GOX Vent Ducts, one on either side of the Flying Saucer, and from there it gets ducted back along the GOX Arm part way, and then dumped into the wider world all around, where it also gets further warmed and diluted by yet more heated GN2 which was diverted off of the main supply Duct that runs along the top of the Arm, down into those two vertical ducts which you got a few good looks at on the previous page when we hung the GOX Arm.

Phew.

Pure GOX, without any considerations of the trouble it might cause from simply being as cold as it is coming out of the top of the ET, can become exceptionally violent stuff, given the right opportunity to do so, and for that reason, they're not taking any chances with it, and they do not like it out there wafting around everything in its pure form, and for that reason they want to thin it down to acceptably-safe concentrations, just like it is in the air you're breathing right now while you're reading this thing, and so they whack it with a healthy admixture of GN2 every chance they get.

And although our drawing isn't the easiest thing in the world to understand, you can see how they're whacking that GOX from three different directions via the use of that Hood, pumping GN2 into the Seals, and pumping more GN2 into the GOX Vent Duct, and then on top of all that, they're also pumping GN2 directly into the open space beneath the Hood, external to the Vents and Seals in there. No chances are being taken on the GOX with this thing.

None.

Because... don't fuck with the GOX, ok?

It'll get you if you do.

Up at the top of the External Tank, just beneath the exterior cover up there, we find yet another busy place, with quite a bit more contrapted gear in there than you might imagine, and luck was with us, because the ITAR Fuckwits seem to have been asleep this day, and they inadvertently permitted us to see what's in there, via publicly-available photographs of it, and when I found 'em, I grabbed 'em, and...

...it just goes to show that all of this ITAR horseshit is just exactly that, a bunch of goddamned horseshit, and the Russians, and the Chinese, and the fucked-up North Koreans and Iranians, and the aliens whizzing by in their flying saucers and everybody else too, already know all of this stuff, and nothing is being kept from anybody by Team ITAR running around throwing cloaks over everything in sight, and... with luck, one of these days they'll all drop dead and in their absence we'll finally, as simple members of the General Public, be able to once again admire, marvel at, and genuinely appreciate the stupendous achievements of all the people who designed and built this stuff, by examining all of it in the wondrous and ever-so-beautiful detail with which it was originally rendered.

Yeah right. Fat fucking chance, MacLaren.

Ok. Enough of that. We're gonna stop with our Lift for a little while, and take a side trip into the land of what goes on up there on the top of the External Tank.

It's not just the GOX Vent, ok?

We'll start with a photograph of them taking the Nose Cap off of the top of the External Tank, inside the VAB, up on the work platform far far above the concrete flooring way down there beneath them.

The NASA sourcing for this image said it's External Tank Number 119, which flew as part of the STS-121 stack, and who am I to question a thing like that?

And once they got the Nose Cap off of the Tank, they very kindly took another photograph, and this is the one where you can get a good look at what's going on up there.

And to properly understand what the hell it is that we're seeing, we need to go all the way down to the other end of things, no longer even on the Tank, all the way down to the bottom of the Orbiter, inside the Engine Compartment.

And we need to go all the way back down there because that's where the pressurant comes from, which is what keeps the Tank at Flight Pressure, which creates a force that holds the LOX inside the Tank sufficiently in place, above and beyond its own weight, down at the bottom of the Tank, despite accelerations, vibrations, and internal fluid motions encountered during launch and flight which might somehow (and it can, and it will, happen) cause the pull of the Turbopumps to get ahead of the fluid body, causing it to momentarily separate from what's being snatched away from it at the piping inlet down there, introducing a gap in the smoothly-continuous flow of fluid to the SSME Turbopump inlets, which would then cavitate the Turbopumps, which could destroy the Turbopumps, violently, resulting in catastrophic loss of, in order, pumps, engines, vehicle, and crew, and... no. So. Flight Pressure, ok? Gotta have it. Mandatory, ok?

So, in order to create that pressurant, they tap a little LOX off of the system down there and run it through a heater (heat being a freely-available commodity that you get whenever you run your SSME's, whether you want it or not, so you may as well go ahead and use some of it, requiring no additional purpose-designed system to create it, thereby increasing overall systems simplicity, reducing weight, and reducing the amount of additional crap that might break) where it quite-promptly boils, turning into a pressurized gas, which they then run all the way back up to the very tiptop of the ET, where it gets pushed down into the space just above where all that LOX is sitting.

NASA Facts tells us all about it.

Here's a large and acceptably uncluttered general arrangement image of the External Tank, with a few labels to help you understand the sense of the overall Tank LOX Pressurization System.

And here's an actual engineering drawing with pretty much all of the same stuff labeled (except Power and Instrumentation, which are shown, but unlabeled), all nice and official-like.

And then we come back to our photograph of the top of the External Tank with the Nose Cap removed, and I've labeled it to let you see what's going on in there, including the GOX Vents, which of course is what started this whole goddamned thing in the first place.

And then one last look at things with a Schematic taken from Page 95 of the exceptionally helpful and detailed Press Information document covering the whole Space Shuttle Transportation System, created in March 1982 by Rockwell International, who are the folks who built the Orbiter (And what the fuck, ITAR Guys, if this thing is fair game for public consumption, how in the name of all holy hell can you justify all the garbage cloak-and-dagger bullshit you keep hiding everything else behind?), and above and beyond helping you understand what's going on underneath the Nose Cap on the External Tank, you also get a few additional nourishing morsels of information to go along with it.

That whole GOX Vent System up on top of the Tank is pretty goddamned complex, and with our Schematic, we can see that Helium has gotten into the act, and we need something nice and inert like that, in an environment that might turn out to be pure gaseous oxygen, to use as power (no different from how we use compressed air to run power tools with sometimes), to open and close our Vent Valve manually if we'd like to do a thing like that while we're still on the ground (and there are times when we do).

On top of that, we get to see a little something called a "Pyrotechnic Tumble Valve" which you can see here, and that thing was discontinued after STS-36 because they decided that they really didn't need it (the best mechanical part is no mechanical part, right?) and it furthermore introduced a slight risk of causing the Tank to hit the Orbiter when it came time to jettison the Tank after they shut down the SSME's, so yeah, "Goodbye useless and dangerous crap," and we can refer back to the photograph I linked to a couple of paragraphs ago, showing what's under the hood on Tank 119 before it flew on STS-121, and sure enough, that whole Tumble System is quite-obviously missing, which agrees well with NASA's information about the provenance of the image being STS-121, which is well after STS-36.

So that's how that all works, ok?

Meanwhile, back at the GOX Arm Tip Assembly, there's an equally-contrapted mess of really cool mechanical shit that gooses our Vent Hood around to where it needs to go, but I don't have any of the drawings of that stuff, so I cannot continue to give you information about it at the level I just got finished giving it to you about the tippy-top of the External Tank (golly gee whiz, thanks ITAR Guys for keeping us all safe from... something... I guess, I dunno, maybe not, whatever...), but you might recall that earlier on, I mentioned how bad it might get if that Hood was to unexpectedly go sideways on 'em when they were in close proximity to the External Tank, and I further mentioned that the Hood was positioned via the use of some Screw Jacks, and I'm sure more than just a few of you scoffed at the ridiculous unlikelihood of a thing like that ever happening, and...

Ok, scoffers, have a look at this...

GOX Vent Hood Drive Screw Failure Report August 9, 2000. Read what I yellow-highlighted and then scroll back up to page 1 of this happy little two-page pdf document and look for the cheerful words "loss of life/vehicle" because they're there, and if that ain't high-octane Nightmare Fuel, I don't know what is.

And of course, in the best tradition of Turning Your Fuckups Into Strokes of Genius, we get to see the follow-on to whatever near-dire event it was that transpired with this thing, and here for your edification is a copy of KSC Core Technical Infrastructure Support Success Stories, presented by... nobody at all, apparently, wherein we learn about a "Fail-Safe Jackscrew" which is actually a really slick solution to an ugly problem, and the extremely-deceptive simplicity and elegance of this solution is a sterling example of Good Engineering, which is something that the Space Shuttle Program was as-well, or better, endowed with, than anything else in all of human history and human endeavor, ok?

I make fun, I point out fuckups and weaknesses, and I tend to snarl a lot, but... this goddamned Program represents the apex of human engineering achievement as it was being implemented, make no mistake about it. It is a pity that our Religious, Political, and Corporate brethren cannot put down their dogma, and learn the ways of ongoing self-correction as it was practiced by the people who made this thing fly.

And they were so pleased with themselves that they went on to include their elegant solution with a Greatest Hits summary of a sort, called Legacy of the Space Shuttle Program, where it's the lead item, and not only do we get more (of the same) info about it, we also get stuff down below that includes a few good images, including an image of one of the Inflatable Seals as seen from inside of it, when it's doing it job, sitting down on top of the External Tank, and as a special, and completely-unrelated bonus, we also get an image which proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that I was not the only person to ever have their picture taken while standing on top of the Lightning Mast, but we're getting a little ahead of ourselves with that one, and shall leave it alone for the time being, ok?

And of course by now you think I'm beating this thing to death, and you're right, but then again, you're not right, because these fucking jackscrew things are everywhere, and certain districts in "everywhere" overlap your own blithely-unaware life, and in particular you get 'em in airliners, and one fine day in January, 2000, eighty-eight souls perished as a direct result of a screw jack failure. You rely on these things to keep you from being turned into a slimy mass of bloody pulp with shattered bone fragments sticking out of it far more often than you might imagine you do, and in every instance, they need to work.

And then of course our Corporate brethren get into the act, and they're not too sure about it, and their friends in the NTSB aren't completely sure about it either, and of course the corporation being Boeing only adds to the slime-factor, and... here, read this. Needless to say, in the intervening decades since those words spoken by the Boeing people were first uttered, things have not gotten better with that corporation, and... as I write these words this very moment (June 12, 2024, 9:50am), they finally got their goddamned Starliner into orbit with actual people inside of it, and they're up there right now, and all I can say is that I sincerely hope those brave people make it back without incident.

So. Ok. Clearly our Gox Hood is fully worthy of every last bit of respect which is is due, because "loss of life/vehicle" is as dire as it gets.

Alright, back to the photograph, back to the Lift.

Anything else going on around this place?

Guide Columns are always fun to talk about, right? So let's talk about the Guide Columns some more.

Lower-left corner of Image 120.

The RCS Room is visible in-frame, and over to the left (in the image) you can see the Right Upper Fixed Guide Columns, and we can now see this particular run of Guide Columns has been skinned-over with 16-gauge stainless steel sheet-metal paneling per 79K24048 sheet S-273.

And I hate the Guide Columns, so that's all you're gonna get.

They're skinned-over. Read all about it on 79K24048 sheet S-268. Big deal.

Ok, what else?

Oh yeah, the Tip Assembly!

The thing we're Lifting today.

The subject of this whole four-image series.

What's up with that thing?

Well...

...we're getting close.

Close to where it goes steel-on-steel, and gets bolted to the GOX Arm.

And the Arm is in its retracted position, sitting on its Latchback, locked in place, ready for the Tip Assembly to get bolted on out there on the end of things, completing the structural sense of the Gaseous Oxygen Vent System.

Look close at the end of the Arm, and there's at least one, but maybe two ironworkers out there, getting ready to go hands-on with the Tip Assembly and make the connection.

Refer back to the previous page to get a good look at the end of the Arm in some of those photographs as it's first coming up off the ground, and you'll immediately see that there's nothing out there on the very end of it by way of handrails or any other kind of physical restraint or barricade to keep people from going over the side.

It's wide open out there, and our ironworkers are as comfortable with their boots on the bitter end of the grating that stops, right where a free drop of over 200 feet starts, as you or I might be with our boots on the kitchen floor, walking over to grab a plate from one of the cabinets.

It's a little different up there.

The view's pretty good from up there, too.

I always liked it better than the Kitchen, but maybe that's just me, I dunno.

Ok, what else?

Bottom-right corner of the frame.

Whoever it was that we saw departing the area, coming up from over the side, getting off of their float, is now back on the float and appears to be returning to work.

So. Was I right, when I first said they were getting out from underneath the Lift? I do not know. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe the ongoing Lift needed to be watched for a little bit, from a safer place. Maybe it didn't. Maybe it was just ongoing moving-around, working tools and equipment. Maybe not. But whenever there's a Lift going on anywhere nearby overhead, people tend to find reasons to not be there unless and until they've satisfied themselves that the risk is either low enough or non-existent. Unless, of course, the job places them in harm's way as a part of getting it done and there's no escaping it.

And I mentioned before about the Arm being retracted, sitting on its Latchback, and this is a garbage photograph for seeing that Latchback, but if I don't talk about it now, I'm not sure I'm gonna get another opportunity to do so later on, so... GOX Arm Latchback.

And maybe even the Hurricane Lock, too.

Lemme think about this one for a minute, ok?

And now that I think about it, I need to get the Access Stair to the GOX Arm, too, and this is a pretty crappy photograph for that too, but again, if I don't hit it now... and actually, for that Stair, this isn't such a terrible photograph for getting a feel for that Stair, so...

Here's Image 120 again, with the GOX Arm Access Stair labeled.

And for attempting to instill a feel for this thing in you, I've labeled the lower and upper Landings in addition to simply pointing out the Stair itself.

And you're up on the FSS at Elevation 260'-0", as high as the Elevator will take you, and you step out of the elevator, and you're facing South, and you're instantly hit by the fact that you're way the hell up there, and the view is tremendous, and you're well above the top of the RSS, which you already know to be a pretty fucking tall thing all by itself, and your boots take you across the steel bar grating, which, never forget, you can see through, and yeah, ok, we're up here, and you walk around to the left of the Elevator Tower, and as you do, your eyes are assaulted by the spectacular vision of Pad A off there in the distance, looking just about as sci-fi as it gets, and the other, far more distant towers of the Titan III ITL, and other stuff too, and don't forget that the GOX Arm itself, resting against the east side of the FSS in its retracted position, sitting on top of its latchback, is over ten full feet above where you're standing, and is in no way blocking any of the amazing view you're getting, and there's the goddamned Atlantic Ocean, impossibly blue and beautiful with a horizon line that's too far away to believe, and then you've continued on around, across the grating, to a location pretty close to the northeast corner of the FSS, and you find yourself going underneath the big Main Framing Pipe Diagonal over there, and...

...you exit the envelope of the FSS on its north side, passing beyond the Perimeter, on to another patch of see-through grating...

And let's stop right there for a minute, which is almost always what you actually do when you're going up here...

Here's 79K24048 sheet S-103 again, but this time I've marked it up to draw your attention to the "Balcony Effect" you get when you're up on the FSS, in addition to the main players here, which consist of the GOX Arm, and the Access Stair with its pair of landings, one lower, one upper, that you take to get on to the GOX Arm by walking directly through the Pivot Frame which sits firmly fastened in between the Upper and Lower Hinge Boxes over there, bolted to the Strongback Columns, on on the east side of the FSS.

And I'm gonna take a little detour from my detour and give you some more words on what I just called the "Balcony Effect" that you get when you're up on the FSS.

You already know all of this, by virtue of your by-now excellent state of familiarity with the FSS having read through the narrative all the way up to this point, but even so, that familiarity is probably pretty "dry." Pretty "academic." None too visceral, even though you might think you know it viscerally by now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's got a whole slew of Main Elevation levels, each one separated by twenty vertical feet from the ones above and below it. There's a pair of elevators in there that you can take to get up to where you want to go, and there's a set of stairs behind the elevators, too. It's 250 feet above the Pad Deck to the top of the thing, and 300 feet above the surrounding wilderness, ok ok, I know, I know. Each Level is 40 feet square, and surrounded by a perimeter handrail. So enough already, what the hell are you trying to tell me now, MacLaren? Tell me something I don't already know, MacLaren.

Ok. Fair enough. But. When you get right down to it, the FSS, as an overall entity, is nothing more than a gigantic stack of extra-large Hotel Balconies, which wrap 360 degrees all the way around a very narrow and tall square "Hotel," which is formed by the central elevator and stair tower, which is the core of the FSS, and which gives a visual and visceral impression of substantial solidity. And since the Main Levels are separated by 20 vertical feet, one from another, it's quite spacious in there on the "Balconies," and the basic effect of that whole concept is one of leaving you feeling extraordinarily exposed wherever it is that you might find yourself when you're up on the FSS. Furthermore, the farther you go up on the FSS, the less cluttered each Main Level gets. Down low, you get all kinds of stuff, and we've talked about a lot of it, and from Scrubbers, to Dewars, to Struts and Catwalks and Cable Trays on the south side, to a great big RSS over there just past the Struts, to no end of other weird crap, the feeling on each Level is noticeably less "wide-open." But once you get above the 200'-0" level, where the Orbiter Access Arm and Slidewire Baskets Access Areas can be found, the place really... opens right up. And of course, by this time you're also higher when it starts happening, and...

And when I say the effect is to leave you feeling exposed up there, I very definitely mean you feel EXPOSED up there...

And you feel it until you fully-develop your "high steel legs" (which very few people do, besides the people who work in places like this all the time as part of their job), and even after you've got your legs, you still feel it, although it does not command your attention in the ways is commands the attention of people who only get to go up there once or twice, every so often, and you're reading these words, and the assumption is that you're interested in this oh-so-totally outré place, and one of the reasons you're interested is because it's a place the like of you've never been in all your life, and will probably never get the chance to visit the like of for the remainder of your life, and...

Beginner's Mind. Beginner's Eyes. Beginner's Gut Churn.

And I was a Beginner too, one time, and I remember strongly the Gut Churn, and all the rest of it, and it's a very definite sensation, and I'd like very much to be able to convey it to you, so that's why I'm going on and on and on about it right now, ok?

Indescribable Beauty in bewildering varieties and strengths, mixed inseparably with Indescribable Terror in bewildering varieties and strengths.

Which is one hell of a weird combination, and it's very definitely not for everybody, but some of us discover to our glee that we love it, and we can never get enough of it, and we try to hold on to these ever-so-peculiar and arresting sensations, in part to savor them again when life has taken us elsewhere, but also to try and share them with other people, 'cause... some of those folks like this kind of stuff very much, too.

And the FSS, by virtue of its peculiar construction, kicks this kind of thing into gear the moment you set foot outside of the elevator, and from there, it only ramps upward.

A "normal" high-rise hotel, with Balconies you can walk out on, offers quite the view, and if you go over by the handrail and lean out a little bit to look down (Careful there, ok? Not every last person comes back home after doing a thing like that, ok? Shit very occasionally happens, ok?) you get a very-definite sensation, but the sensation is ramped up quite a bit on the FSS, and it's ramped up for more than one reason, and it's already kicking into gear before you ever get over there to the handrail in the first place.

Steel-bar grating. "Holy fuck, I can see right through the floor! Get me the hell outta here!!"

The "floor" above you is two full stories above you. And that extra volume of empty space above your head lets you know it's there, and one of the ways it lets you know it's there is by leaving you with a sensation of being a bit more... exposed. There's less of the solidity you subconsciously feel when the roof is only eight or nine feet above your head, and that applies in equal force even when the "roof" is only the underside of the next balcony up. And of course, as with looking down at steel-bar grating, looking up also allows you to see right through it, and of course that further reduces your sensation of "solidity" with your immediate surroundings.

The balcony on a normal hotel is part of a wall, or maybe a corner, and either way, as you look outward, you remain fully-aware in a funny subconscious way, of the great mass of the hotel behind you over your shoulders, which forms a rock-solid extension of the very Earth you are held up by, and stand upon, every day. Not so the FSS. It's only 40 feet wide, and you're never more than half of that from the edge, and that too works on you subconsciously. The damn thing's not really even there. There's not enough of it. It's all edge and no floor.

And nary a solid window to be found, anywhere. Nor wall.

Birds and bugs (Wasps in particular. For some reasons wasps love it up at the top of all the Launch Towers out on the Cape.) occasionally flit by, and they fly right through the thing, from one side to the other, and then keep right on going, completely unimpeded as they do so.

Naked steel everywhere you look, and naked steel is gut-churningly airy stuff. A few sticks and twigs of metal here and there, but the goddamned thing is, for the most part, air.

Nobody makes hotels out of air, and even if they did, you'd never in your life imagine yourself wanting to go and stay in one. It gets a little weathery every once in a while when you're staying in a hotel made of air.

And the air is moving right through the thing too, and the air joins the chorus, and it too is telling you that the FSS you're standing on far far too high above the earth below your feet, isn't even there.

And you can read these words, and you can give a little snort of derision about my trying to tell you such patent nonsense, but when you're up there on the FSS...

Your stomach knows, even if the academic brain you're using right now to read these words doesn't.

And your Beginner's Mind knows, too.

So ok. So it's out of the Elevator we go, and the view is immediately arresting, and around to the left we go, over to the general area of the northeast corner of the goddamned thing, and it's already pretty fucking exposed, and now we get to exit the envelope and step out into the Great Beyond, with nothing at all beneath our feet except a way-too-thin layer of steel-bar grating.

Here's 79K24048 sheet S-103 yet again, to remind you exactly where it is that you're going. And you're going out there, headed for the stair treads which will take you ten feet east-bound and upward, even as you continue to remain outside the envelope.

And just as an interesting little note, that first bit of steel outside the envelope, the lower landing of the Stair, starts working on the gut churn circuitry of your brain right away, and it does so via a thing so small, so insignificant, that if I did not stop right here and point your attention specifically to it, you'd very likely never notice it at all, while looking at the drawings. And of course, we're not up on the Tower right now, so all you get is the fucked-up drawings, along with my own fucked-up words, and...

Your academic brain is never gonna pick this little detail up on its own, ok?

Never gonna happen.

And it revolves around which direction you're facing, as you exit the envelope, stepping out onto that Lower Stair Landing, passing beyond the Perimeter Handrails which surround every Level of the FSS.

You're facing more or less due north, with that first step out onto the Landing.

Now, stop and look at that confusing snarl of crap-ass rendering on 79K24048 sheet S-111, up in the top left corner of the drawing. Closely, please.

Find the Lower Stair Landing. North will be to the right, and north is the direction you're facing as you exit the envelope, over 200 feet above the Pad Deck, down there below the soles of your boots.

Now look at where it says "1¼ GRATING" right in the middle of that landing. Then notice the funny line immediately below those words. See how it has a kind of half-arrowhead on either end, each half-arrowhead being on opposite sides of the line that connects them? See that thing?

That thing is telling us which direction the Bearing Bars of the grating run. And the direction the Bearing Bars run is also the direction you're looking in when the grating essentially goes invisible and you can see right through it, with truly awful clarity, and your clear vision of the physical world down there over 200 feet below you, is impeded only by a pattern of thin dark parallel lines (which are the Bearing Bars viewed edge-on from above), and is otherwise just the same as looking through... nothing at all.

Because...

In between the Bearing Bars...

There is...

Nothing at all.

And you just stepped out past the perimeter of the FSS, stepping north onto that Landing, and you can bet your ass you'll be looking down at what you're about to entrust your life totally to, and you're also still looking a bit north as you do so, and...

It lines up perfectly...

...invisibly...

And unlike when you stepped out of the Elevator...

There. Is. NOTHING. Beyond. The. Grating.

No pipe. No conduit. No cable tray. No next level down. No Struts, no RSS, no NOTHING.

Till you get to that stuff that's down there over 200 feet beneath you.

And it's an extraordinarily minor detail on a goddamned drawing.

And your fucked-up academic brain takes it all in and says something monumentally stupid to itself along the lines of, "Ok, I see. I get it. I understand."

And it sends you merrily along your way.

And you never felt a goddamned thing, and because you never felt a goddamned thing, you very very much never understood a goddamned thing, despite smugly telling yourself, "I get it."

Feh.

But.

When it's YOUR boot.

On THAT grating.

Well...

You'll "get it" THEN.

And when you "get it," for your first time. With your Beginner's Mind. You will be astounded at just how HARD it hits you.

And then you get to turn the corner and head up the Stair.

And of course it just keeps right on getting better and better.

The Stair doesn't touch the Tower.

There's two feet of space between the innermost handrail on the Stair, and the airy emptiness of the FSS above the Main Floor Level you just departed to get on to the Stair.

And two feet certainly doesn't sound like much...

But it's enough...

And of course it's not like there's a wall or anything over there past the two feet...

And that's the comforting side of things...

Because over on the other side.

The north side...

It's wide open, baby.

All the way to the horizon.

All the way to the ground.

Now, in their defense, they did enclose the Landings and the Stair with Expanded Metal Screen welded to all the perimeter handrails around them.

And so long as you're not looking down at the grating, in the direction that the Bearing Bars run, that Expanded Metal Screen offers a surprising amount of psychological aid and comfort in addition to the physical aid and comfort it provides.

But.

Now we're up on the Stair.

And so long as we're headed upwards...

All is well.

Our vision is filled with Stair Treads and Handrails in front of us, and above us, too. We very reasonably feel safe in an environment like that.

But what happens when it's time to come back down?

Interestingness is what happens.

79K24048 sheet S-111 is a fucking mess, but the information is there, nonetheless.

And among all the nice information it gives you is the numbers for the Stair.

Which runs ten vertical feet upwards (well... 10'-3" if you must), while running eleven horizontal feet across.

And the drawing tells us that each stair tread is 7¼" above or below the next, and if we work the numbers, we get 17 risers from the bottom of the Stair to the top, and and if we work the numbers again, we learn that for every riser step 7¼" up or down we take, we travel 7¾" inch across, and there's no intermediate landing like you get with almost every other stair you've ever encountered in your life that takes you ten feet up or down. Ok. All well and good.

And the Handrail is 3'-5" On Center above the top of the Grating, which makes the top edge of the handrail pipe a nice even 3'-6" above the Grating.

Ok, ok. Alright already. Get to the fucking point MacLaren.

Well...

Here you are, coming down the GOX Arm Access Stair, and you're just about to step off the Top Landing, with ten vertical feet of Stair out there in front of you, to take you down and across.

And of course you're out there. Out beyond the envelope, with the airy emptiness of the FSS and GOX Arm over there to your left, and nothing at all for company to your right except for that buzzard lazily thermalling along, a hundred feet below you. And if you don't believe that, please go back to Page 1 of this goddamned thing, and click the first image in this goddamned thing, and bring it up full size, and goddamnit, I even went so far as to label the sonofabitch, so don't go telling me that bird's not there, ok? The Stair itself hadn't been built yet, but that fucking bird is there.

Yeeks!

But you've got this nice handrail which is 3'-6" tall, coming up to just about belly-button-high on your six foot tall body (or maybe all the way up to the bottom of your tits if you're shorter), as you stand there on that Top Landing, to hem you in and keep you safe.

Right?

Two, just two Stair Treads out in front of you, as you start walking down the Stair...

That second tread ahead of you, terminates exactly 15½" away, and the height of the handrail segment directly above it is only twenty-one and a half inches above the soles of your boots, which is only knee high on you, and moving forward from there, it only gets worse as that goddamned handrail keeps right on sloping downward, away from you, and below you.

Much worse.

And what winds up happening is that the alarm systems in your brain look out there just two short steps ahead of where you're standing, see that the fucking handrail out there is only KNEE HIGH, and beyond that it's even LOWER, and...

As all good alarm systems do, they instantaneously size up the situation without you even knowing they're doing it, and they factor in "What happens if I should accidentally stumble forward, and a little to the side, maybe?" (it happens, and they know it), and they become alarmed.

And it's a pretty goddamned queasy feeling out there in wholly-exposed space 200 feet above certain death, as you're headed back down that goddamned Stair.

Rely on it, ok?

You may take this one to the bank, because when your Beginner's Mind first encounters this fucking Stair...

All of the alarms are going to be in overdrive.

But of course, some of us discover to our delight that we love it.

Don't ask why, because we cannot tell you why.

We can only tell you that, as sensations go, this one is pretty...

...sensational.

And we like sensational sensations.

Which is more than enough for us right there, and any further attempts at explanation, either to ourselves or to someone else, are a complete and utter waste of time.

And whenever you hear me say "It's not for everybody" or words to that effect, this is oftentimes the kind of stuff I'm referring to.

And there's exactly six places, on the whole Launch Pad, where you get a Stair that gives you this type of sensation, and this is the sixth and final one that I get to tell you about.

We met the first one as an individual, back on Tracking the Steel: Page 1 - RSS Various, down near the bottom of that page.

We then met our first pair of them in the form of the Hinged TSM Access Stairs, back on Page 24.

And on the very next page, Page 25, we met our second pair of them in the form of Stair Number 1 and Stair Number 2.

And here and now we are finishing with the sixth one, as an individual, and it's here and now that I've tried to flesh-out and elaborate-on the peculiar mana of these things as best I can, which, to be perfectly honest, is a pretty poor effort. Pretty weak tea. But when you enter a zone where mere words are never going to do, well... there's not a lot you can do, right?

There are other places, where stairs take you to locations that are close to the edge and some of the views are pretty cool, and some of the sensations are pretty cool, but as far as properly getting out there, it's just these six, and that's it, ok?

And once again, in an attempt to convey the intense otherness of Pad B, I'm going to take you back to a "normal" high-rise hotel, or other tall building, and yes, you've been up there, and yes, you saw it, and yes, you felt it, some, but no, none of those places were more air than building, and none of those places could hold the least candle to the overall expansive wide-screen sci-fi bizarrity of Pad B, and none of those goddamned places had fucking Stairs where you found yourself suddenly being taken outside the envelope, and...

That fucking FSS was beyond belief. Just un-fucking-believable, ok? And when you were on it...

You could feel it.

And of course, if you wanted to feel it a little bit more...

...you could always go...

...over the handrail...

...and out on the iron.

And now the whole place is gone, and none of us will ever feel it again on any of these Stairs, and if you never had a chance in the first place, all I can do is to hope that maybe I've done my wordsmithing well enough, just barely, even for only for one or two of you, to perhaps cause you to visit the FSS in your dreams.

And if the dream is vivid enough...

If it's radical enough...

You'll feel it.

And you make the top of the stair, and you hit that landing up there, and then you can step across and through and out onto the GOX Arm itself.

You've already seen a bit of this stair on the previous page, and a bit of the landing at the top of it too, and I'm gonna return you to the images which include them, to point them out to you, and let you see a few bits of it from nearby, even though both views are pretty suboptimal, ok?

In Image 115, I've marked it up, and we're getting a look across to the north, and our Access Stair is visible out there beyond the big east-west-running Pipe Diagonal that goes out of frame about a third of the way up from the bottom, over on the left margin, which of course is telling us the Stair is outside the envelope.

And in this marked-up version of the previous photograph taken during the Lift, Image 114, you can see where they've gone so far as to get part of the framing steel for the Top Landing of our Stair hung, but in order to leave sufficient clearance to hang the GOX Arm, they left off with the whole south side of the Landing, and I'm gonna go just a little further with this and mark up 79K24048 sheet S-111 by erasing that part of things which have not yet been hung on the Tower in Image 114, so you can actually see and understand what's going on here.

And here's 79K24048 sheet S-111 plain, unmarked, just to piss you off. And I wish you the very best of luck making sense of all that... crap, over there by the stupid Hinge Box without any additional visual help from yours truly. This thing is such a goddamned mess that the removal of a lot of that unnecessarily-crammed-in, and poorly-rendered, detail up there in the top-left corner which I did for you in the altered version does wonders for being able to make actual sense of what we're looking at here, and I recommend leaving the altered version open in one tab, going back up to click on the unaltered version and opening it up in another tab, and then clicking back and forth, blinking on and off between them. A lot of cool stuff suddenly pops into comprehensible view, and becomes... comprehensible... which is nice, right?

And some of the junk in there, that disappears with the altered version, consists in the Rolling Gates along with their Guide Channels, which they used to keep you from going over the side when entering or exiting the Arm, whether it was retracted or extended. Those Gates were interesting deals, and although, yet again, they're poorly rendered (for being able to just simply look at on the drawings and understand what you're seeing), they're still kind of neat, so here they both are, with the Guide Channels for them on 79K24048 sheet S-112, and the Gates themselves on 79K24048 sheet S-113. We don't get a rendering of the curved piece of grating that allowed the Arm to swing to and fro without leaving a gap somewhere, but we've seen similar elsewhere and we'll be returning to it later on, so I'm not gonna be getting into that part of things, right here, right now, ok?

Surely, what you've had with this stuff, up to this point, has been enough, hasn't it?

Elsewhere in our photograph, looking up at the Beanie Cap itself, we can see a small wedge of bright daylight showing in between the pair of Inflatable Seals on the underside of the Flying Saucer. Skip back to the image at the very top of this page, and the same wedge of bright daylight shows up as black, up at the top, right under where the GN2 gets pumped inside of it at the apex of the cone, over there on the right side of things, with a bit of handrail obscuring it, but not much.

As to what's going on with that, I have not the faintest idea. They needed one of the metal panels that the Hood is made of removed during this lift and initial bolt-up to the Arm, but I do not know why. I don't recall Ivey having anything at all to do with it, and presumably it was for the TT&V people, or somebody else's people, to be able to get in there and do some damn thing or other immediately following bolt-up and the departure of the ironworkers who did that work, or... I dunno. Please accept my apologies for not knowing why, ok?

And I drew your attention to the handrail that runs around the perimeter of the Flying Saucer, visible in Image 117 up at the top of this page, and we may as well linger there for just a bit more, and please notice the weirdie outward-curved bends in the handrail posts, but only three of them, in between the top and bottom handrail runners, and if you look really close, you can see that the curved part of things doesn't quite make it all the way down to the intermediate runner, and instead the vertical part of the post extends just above that intermediate runner for three inches or so, and that, to me, is weird weird weird, and it sure the hell looks like that post was curved the way it is to accommodate some kind of duct, or pipe, or something, but never in my life have I been able to find out what, or why it was done that way. There was a change order somewhere along the line, clearly, (and for that matter, the whole ET Gaseous Oxygen Vent System was a change order) which came in after the handrails had been fabricated and installed on the Hood, and I guess they reconfigured the ducting somehow and at the same time said, "Fuckit, leave the handrails just like they are," but... wild-ass guessery is all that is, and... maybe one day I'll get my answer and be able to come back here and tell the tale, but... not today. Sigh.

But we're not done with photographs of the GOX Vent Tip Assembly just yet, either. We'll be coming back to it, and when we do, we'll have images taken from pretty close range, over at Pad A, interestingly enough, showing us a lot of stuff with the finished, operational Tip Assembly as it appeared in the early 1980's, in pretty good detail. But not now, ok? We'll get there, but we want to stay on the timeline with the construction of the Launch Pad, and staying on the timeline pushes those additional photographs of the Tip Assembly a little farther along into the body of our narrative. But again, I promise you, we'll be coming back to this stuff, photographically and narratively.

Farther up this page, but still below the final photograph, I mentioned that I had probably better take this opportunity, while I had it, to tell you about the GOX Arm Latchback, even though you cannot even see the damn thing in the photograph, and...

Ok, let's do that now, how 'bout?

The Access Platforms for the Latchback were well-covered on the previous page, and you are presumed to have the understanding of them you need, but the Latchback itself...

No. Nary a peep have I to this point made, about the Latchback itself.

And it's a pretty cool deal, so... ok.

And it lived straight across the east face of the FSS from the Arm over there near the southeast corner, and its job, as surely you have already ascertained just from seeing its name, was to provide a secure place for the Arm, when it was not in use and was instead retracted, folded back against the face of the FSS, to be stowed, all nice and locked in place where it wouldn't be able to flop around, and, god-forbid, go somewhere, when they very much did not want it going anywhere. So ok. So we'll latch it back to the tower with our Latchback. Tra la la.

And here's the general arrangement of all that, with the Arm shown out of the way in extended position, so as you can actually see the Latchback, which lives directly underneath it, on 79K24048 sheet M-351.

Closer looks at the Latchback can be had on 79K24048 sheet M-355 with some additional details on 79K24048 sheet M-356. You can see that this thing is quite a bit more complicated than you might at first imagine it to be, and it would be nice to have additional drawings of it, but alas I do not, so this is all you're gonna be getting out of me for the Latchback, ok?

Just going by an old-fashioned "Mark I Eyeballs" seat-of-the-pants engineering evaluation, I'd say this thing was capable of taking one hell of a beating when they swung the GOX Arm back against the FSS onto it. I have nothing at all by way of fabrication drawings for it, but vague memory tells me the main Latchback Support Assembly that the Skid sat on top of was quarter-inch steel, and stiffened up pretty good in multiple different locations. That, plus the mere existence of the Latchback Strongback Columns it was all bolted to, bespeaks of some forces being applied through this thing that might have been surprisingly... forceful.

I was never anywhere near the damn thing when they extended or retracted the Arm, so... there's not much else I can give you about this end of things with the GOX Arm. Sigh.

And I also mentioned the GOX Arm Hurricane Lock, and at least you can see it in Image 120, although only just, and from a quite-poor viewing angle, too.

The Hurricane Lock always struck me as being a little on the flimsy side (at least when you compare it to the way everything else out here is built), and it was a pretty simple-minded kind of thing, and there wasn't much to it, and it never really interested me very much once I had a chance to see it and understand it, and there's other stuff up here, too, and we'll give that stuff a look in just a minute, and all in all, this whole little zone of "flimsy" stuff hanging off of the FSS up near its top just never really entered my consciousness in any particularly meaningful way. Just some extra cruft hanging off the tower, no more than that.

But we're learning about our Launch Pad, and this stuff is part of it, so we stop a moment, and give it the consideration which it is due.

And the first thing we learn is that MacLaren completely failed to ever get any kind of half-ass decent image of this thing, and the area it lives in, and the components in that area that block it from proper view on any of the photographs MacLaren took, so...

Wish me luck with this one, ok? I'm gonna need it.

And I'm going to start out as simple as possible, with Image 120, again, this time faded, except for the Hurricane Lock and its Support Column which ran from Elevation 260'-0" to 280'-0" on Side 2 of the FSS, with a workpoint 11'-0" back there away from the Side 1/2 FSS Main Framing Corner Column.

And there's some Certifiable Weirdness going on with the damned Hurricane Lock, which I have zero recollection of so I cannot tell you what we did or why we did it, and that Weirdness consists in the fact that Rink, for whatever good and sufficient reasons, chose to erect the fucking thing incomplete, and there's large pieces of it that are missing, and when you look at the photographs of it (I'll be referring back to one of the previous images from Page 66 to help you see this), and try to pick it out from the welter of ever-so-misleading structural steel background, it never quite makes any sense at all, and it's not until you realize there's stuff that's not there, that you begin to start to understand it, but even then, it still refuses to give itself away, because of other intervening shit that blocks other parts of it that should be visible but because they're blocked, they're not visible, and... godDAMNit this thing is a huge pain in the ass to figure out, and then on top of all that, we go to our House of Horrors known as 79K24048 to try and make sense of it using the goddamned drawings, and of course they get into the act, and work hard to confuse the living hell out of us, and in the end, the miracle is that we can see anything at all, and make any sense of it at all, and there's parts of it that I'm still not sure about.

Oh joy!

The Hurricane Lock sat just beneath the Antenna Platform that runs full-length along Side 2 of the FSS, up there at the 280'-0" elevation, and that Antenna Platform has a fucked-up cable tray that runs along underneath it, and as it turns out, the Top Chord of the Hurricane Lock threads between the cable tray and the Antenna Platform, which... kinda makes it impossible to see up there where it connects to the tower.

Here's 79K24048 sheet E-427 giving you a generalized plan and elevation view of this area, marked up to indicate where the Top Chord of the Hurricane Lock was threaded across to its structural connection with the FSS, having to go above that cable tray below the Antenna Platform to get there. And of course our good friends at PRC/BRPH chose to not show the damn Hurricane Lock on this drawing, nor do they ever give us any drawing which shows all of this stuff, cheek-by-jowl, all crammed in there together. Of course.

And what's a "Top Chord" anyway?

And it's engineering-speak for the top piece of trusswork that makes up the Hurricane Lock, which, as might seem reasonable, would make the Bottom Chord the bottom piece of trusswork, and if you presumed such a thing to be true, you would be presuming correctly.

Here they both are, here, on 79K24048 sheet S-119, highlighted. Along with a bunch of other annoyingly-confusing 79K24048 crap, (that I'll have to be taking us back to in a little while), which, yes.. it really does show us how to build this thing, but... somebody in middle management was breathing down everybody's neck, and it was almost as if they were using some kind of a crazed MBA metric wherein every single running inch of lines or lettering on a drawing were given a dollar value, and therefore they relentlessly went after the poor schlubs who actually had to draw this crap, making them shrink things down as much as possible and omit things to the absolute maximal amount, in some kind of ruinously short-sighted attempt to save money, which it did not, because every nickel saved on drawing lines was paid for with a dollar of additional field engineering time, and I should know that, because, after all, it was me that got sent over there to the PRC/BRPH field trailers for an astounding amount of visits, trying to get enough sense out of 79K24048, for Wade, and Dick Walls, and Rink, to allow them to build the motherfucker. Gah!

Ok, Hurricane Lock Top and Bottom Chords. How very nice. And now we know the Top Chord threads through the space between the bottom of the Antenna Platform and the top of the Cable Tray that runs beneath it, so how 'bout we get a look at the sides of our Hurricane Lock?

Ok, fine. And as you can see by the shape of the Chords, this whole thing is kind of wedge-shaped, with the wide end of the wedge attached to the FSS, and the pointy end of the wedge sticking out to the south, and the whole wedge is kind of rolled over on its side, which means we've got one face of our wedge closer-to the GOX Arm, and the other face is farther away, and if we look at S-119 again, we can see callouts 'A' and 'B' taking us to S-121 to look at both faces, which we'll be doing here shortly, in the next paragraph, and the 'A' side is closest to the GOX Arm, and the 'B' side is farthest away, and since the whole thing sticks out at an angle, the two sides are different lengths, with the 'B' side being the long one. Let's have some more of that delicious 79K24048 confusion, in the form of sheet S-115, to let us see this stuff (sort of), along with a frightening amount of too-small crammed-in other stuff, which we're going to have to return to, but not right this second, ok?

All well and good.

And here's 79K24048 sheet S-121 for you to admire, letting you see both faces of the wedge, and as a special bonus, you also get a pretty good look at one of the two actual lock mechanisms, which is a big turnbuckle with ball-ends (which were kept elsewhere except in time of need, so they never show up on any of our photographs), that fit removably into hinged-sockets which you can see here on 79K24048 sheet S-122, and the ball-and-socket construction allows for the whole schmutz to move around some, as-needed, during installation, removal, and adjustment of the locks, while the turnbuckles allow us to pull the GOX Arm back against the FSS with enough force to make sure it all stays right where we want it to stay, no matter how hard the wind blows, and... okey dokey.

And on S-121 we can see that the 'B' side of the wedge has three diagonal braces, coupled with two intermediate vertical members tying the Top and Bottom Chords together midway along their length, and...

Now go back and look at Image 120 again, and tell me where those intermediate vertical members on the 'B' side are?

And no matter how hard you look for 'em, you're not gonna see 'em, and that's because they're not there.

And why that might be the case, I've already told you that I have no idea, but let this kind of thing maybe stick around in your brain for future reference, when you're looking at plans, and you're looking at the thing the plans told you to build, and for unknowable reasons, sometimes the plans and the thing completely fail to agree, and if you're just kind of skimming along with stuff, shit like this can really come boomeranging around on you and bite you on the ass like a goddamned bull shark, and maybe take a piece of you with it when it does.

So you gotta mind, ok?

And here's Image 107, from the previous page, highlighted and labeled (as best I could, anyway), to give you a look at the Hurricane Lock from another angle, and from here, those two missing 'B' Side vertical members are much more obvious in their absence, although neither one of them is blowing a trumpet, and they could easily be missed if you're not specifically looking for them. Gah.

That Hurricane Lock, when it was securely fastened to the GOX Arm, and maybe in September a hurricane came along, and the GOX Arm started getting pushed around by hurricane-force winds a little bit, was capable of exerting some substantial force back into the structure of the FSS, and up at the Top Chord they had the FSS Primary Framing to take that load, but down at the Bottom Chord, on the 'B' Side, they didn't have anything at all, so that needed to get dealt with, and the solution to that was to run a nice stout W18x76 vertically between the Main Framing Levels from 260'-0" to 280'-0", so they could tie the 'B' Side Bottom Chord to something up there to keep shit from getting away from them when the wind really decided to start blowing.

And for reasons I'll never learn, that goddamned Vertical Support Column was just about an unloved motherfucker, and the gods of 79K24048 chose to express that lack of love in the form of (despite the fact that it would have been the easiest thing in the world to do) an utter refusal to depict this thing in any kind of sane or visually-understandable way, and as a result...

We get to chase it around across the 79K24048 landscape a little bit.

And to start with, back we go to our old friend 79K24048 sheet S-115, where I've added the Vertical Support Column to my labeling of the Hurricane Lock.

But they're not really telling us exactly where to put it, so...

Off to the races we go, to S-119, again, (And haven't we seen that one enough already?), where we find...

One of the most stupidest things I've ever had the misfortune to cross paths with, when it comes to simply extracting the basic information we need to fabricate and install this damnable column off of the fucked-up drawing package.

Here's 79K24048 sheet S-119 again, plain, unmarked by myself.

Ok. Now. Tell me how this miserable column works, based on what you're seeing there. Tell me where it goes. Tell me how to build it.

Ok, time's up.

Where's it go? How's it get built? How does it attach to the FSS?...

Yeah.

So now I'm gonna help you out a little...

79K24048 sheet S-119 marked up to let you see some (but very definitely not all) of the kind of PRC/BRPH horseshit we had to deal with as we attempted to give NASA what they wanted with this stuff.

And S-119 begat S-120, and the lord sayeth, "Go thee unto there now, as per Satan's own inscrutable little callout on S-119 View 'B', and beholdeth thou some Mystery 'H' on S-120, and see if you can figure out any of this stupid shit, because I sure as hell cannot, and am over it, yea and verily."

So ok, so here you go, in all of its unmarked glory, 79K24048 sheet S-120.

And that's not very satisfying, so I guess I'll have to mark it up some, too.

So here's that, on a marked up version of 79K24048 sheet S-120, and we finally discover that the stupid unmarked single line on S-119, with an ubercryptic little callout note pointing to it, telling us to go to 'H' on S-120, turns out to be our Hurricane Lock Vertical Support Column for god's sake, and among other things on S-120, we can see that the actual Hurricane Lock uses less than half of the real estate provided by that Vertical Support Column, which seems more than just a little wasteful, but there was nothing else up here to kludge something on to, so ok, so we're stuck, so we'll make the damn thing twenty feet tall to stiffen up the Bottom Chord of a trusswork that's only 7'-11" deep, and... oh well, watchagonnado?

But even with my markups to help you actually see this thing, it's still not right. There's something funny going on here. What the hell's going on with this thing, anyway?

And back again we go, back to an S-120 that we seem to be trapped in, and I'm gonna mark it up some more! And while I'm marking it up, I'm gonna go ahead and include the 'A' Side Hurricane Lock connection to the FSS, just to give you a little more by way of overall orientation with this crap, because this crap is fucking disorienting.

Here, check it out, a new and improved 79K24048 sheet S-120!

And now we find ourselves dealing with a Mystery Beam, and the slimeball motherfuckers are making us double back all the way to S-116 to see what's going on with that (at Elevation 280'-0" only I might add), and son of a fucking bitch, the goddamned Antenna Platform has managed to get back into the act and...

Fuck me. Fuck my life.

Turns out they had to beef up the Antenna Platform a little bit, and to do that they added four new beams up there, and it just so happens that one of them...

Decided to get squarely into the knickers of the goddamned Hurricane Lock.

So we'll loop all the way around past S-116 to start with, and hit 79K24048 sheet S-115 to see if we can make any sense of this thing.

And on this incarnation of S-115, you can see where I've green-highlighted the Antenna Platform, and I've also labeled the Mystery Beam that we stumbled across, unannounced, unlabeled, on S-120. There's four of these things, but for our present purposes, we don't give a shit about any of 'em (but stick around, ok, that's gonna change) except for the one that ties back to the FSS at the exact same location that our Hurricane Lock Vertical Support Column ties back to it, up at Elevation 280'-0"!

Gah!

And I'm gonna stop right here for a few seconds, and marvel at the fact that things which are right there on the drawings somehow remain completely invisible unless some thing, or some body, comes along and basically rubs your nose right down into them. Take a break. Play around with this. Let's have some Fun With Psychology. Open up all the different versions of these fucked-up drawings I'm showing you right now, and flip back and forth between them to see the differences in how I've colored, highlighted, and labeled stuff, all of which is on every version of each drawing! And this is one of the best examples of this bizarre phenomenon that I've ever crossed paths with, and for that reason, it's well worth your time and maybe some head-scratching to dig into it, even if only just a little bit.

Once it's been pointed out to you, it's like... well, duh, of course, there it is, right there, but without specific precise direction to the item in question, you're never going to find it on your own. Never!

So ok. So Weird Psychology.

Now, where were we?

Oh yeah, we were trying to furnish and install a fucked-up Hurricane Lock on the fucked-up FSS, and were having no end of jolly fun with it because...

79K24048.

So now that we know where we are, let's press forward to S-116 to (hopefully) get some kind of sensible rendering of our Mystery Beam. They're calling for it on S-115 and S-120, and they're showing it (sort of), so it would be nice if, maybe, they'd tell us how to make the goddamned thing, so as we can insinuate it into both the Antenna Platform and the Hurricane Lock, and maybe once we're done with that, we can get the hell out of here, and move on to something (yeah, right) that makes a little more sense, and, who knows, might even be shown with a little more sense, on the drawings.

So here you go, a marked-up 79K24048 sheet S-116 that's not only showing you what they're showing you, but also what they're not showing you, and lemme tell you, it's that not showing you stuff that'll kill you when you're hanging by your tail from the iron, 280 feet up there, trying to figure this stuff out, and the rule for shit like that always seemed to be: The smaller the thing they're not showing you, but should be showing you, the worse it gets for trying to understand the goddamned engineering so as you can fabricate and install the motherfucker.

And we're up here on the Antenna Platform now, so may as well finish off with it so as get the hell away from it and, hopefully, go someplace that's a little more enjoyable. A little more fun to be hanging around on.

And I just realized that, apparently, I simply do not like "Antenna" platforms in general, and that's a little weird, now that I think about it, and when I think about it some more, it goes from a little weird to a lotta stupid, and...

On the two towers, there's a total of three of 'em, two on the RSS, and one on the FSS, and...

Of the three of 'em, the Antenna Access Platform, on the RSS at Elevation 198'-7½" which was that horrid little ledge on the face of the RSS just above the PCR Doors, has at least earned my distaste for it, because of it being nasty, and unpleasant, and dangerous, but it's also where I grew as a person by virtue of the fact that it's the very first place where I went over the side, down on to a float, under the watchful eyes of Wilhoit's ironworkers, and that alone recommends it highly...

...but I still don't like it, and I don't care what anybody says about it.

But the other two, the one that runs along RSS Column Line A behind the Hoist Equipment Room up at Elevation 211'-1¾", and the one we find ourselves dealing with here, on FSS Side 2 at Elevation 280'-0"...

I dunno.

I have no reason at all to not find them as interesting as any of the other stuff up here...

Fuckit. Who knows?

But if I don't do this now, I'm never gonna do it, so let's stop a moment and look at the Antennas themselves, because that's one of the main ways some very critical systems communicate between the Pad and elsewhere, and there's a bunch of 'em on the RSS and another bunch of 'em on the FSS, and...

Here's what you get along the back side of the RSS, running along Column Line A up at 211'-1¾" shown on 79K14110 sheet A-16, to let you see where this set of Antennas lives on the RSS. And as an "Oh, by the way," this is one of the first places we ever visited for real, back when I was still an answering machine, back on Page 6 when we first started to really sink our teeth into this thing for real, and it's pretty cool to come back to some of those drawings we were using to get our feet wet with this stuff, and look at them once again, with new eyes, now that we're as far along as we are, with new understanding.

Close in on it a little closer, using 79K24048 sheet E-475, and we see that our previous view, on a 79K14110 Architectural drawing, was just a sort of schematic of this set of Antennas, and on the Electrical drawing, we learn that they were pointed in a surprising number of different directions, clearly for different reasons, talking to different things in different places that I'm sure I'll never in my life learn about, and this very definitely includes the fact that I have no idea as to whether these particular Antenna orientations for any given Antenna were for use with the RSS in the Mate or Demate positions.

And in The Department of Stuff I Do Not Know, we can add that cryptic "ORARS" that's in the title block of E-475, and I've looked, but so far nothing has turned up, and I have no idea what that stands for, and that kind of shit gripes my ass, and if I ever find out what it is, you can rest assured that I'll come back here and let you know, ok? Fucking acronyms. Buncha goddamned gobbledygook. Hate 'em.

The Antennas were attached to their pipe support stanchions using an "Andrew Mounting Kit," and those things were fixed, permanently, providing zero further alignment and pointing adjustment once they were finish-fastened in place by whoever it was that did that work, so each Antenna, from then on, pointed forevermore in whatever direction it might have been pointing in dependent on the rotational position of the whole goddamned RSS as it swung grandly between Mate and Demate positions. I would presume that most of it would be for the RSS in the Mated position, when it was dealing directly with the Orbiter and/or its Payload, but that's just guesswork, ok?

And we've already seen the dishes up near the top of the FSS, which is where we're presently still trying to wrap this thing up and get away from, but here's 79K24048 sheet E-427 again (unmarked this time), just to help you refamiliarize yourself with the basic setup, and while we're at it, maybe take note of that drawing title: "Open Loop RF C/O Sys FSS Cable Trays Installation And Modifications", which I'm pretty sure is telling us about one-way (Open Loop) Checkout System communications from the antenna to a receiver somewhere, as opposed to two-way (Closed Loop) communications from the antenna to a receiver and back again, and maybe give that some consideration as regards our just-mentioned Mystery Acronym, "ORARS", and there's a piece of me that wants ORARS to lean in the direction of Open-loop RF Antenna somethingorother System but I'm really reaching for it here, so... nah, probably not, but... who knows?

And as with the stuff on the back of the RSS which we just saw, you get a bunch of dishes, and the presumption would be that the dishes are of a particular construction, and also need to be pointed at something, and ok, they give us that too, except that whereas before, that stuff was all on a single drawing, this time it's gonna be on two separate drawings, so let's look at how the Dishes were constructed on 79K24048 sheet E-429, and we see that they're essentially the same thing we've already seen on the RSS, and while we're here, please notice the interestingness you have to deal with, when you find yourself having to deal with Waveguides, which is what happens to you whether you want it to or not, when the Frequencies you're dealing with exceed a certain level, and oh yeah, don't forget the weird-ass requirement for GN2 purge pressurization with this stuff, and... yeeks!

And then we get to back up one sheet to see which way they're all pointed, on 79K24048 sheet E-428, and as opposed to the every-whichaway orientations we saw on the RSS (which moved, and I'm guessing that had something to do with it, but Mate/Demate is only two places, and those Dishes were pointed all over the goddamned place), our set of Dishes on the FSS looks like they're all pointing in the same exact general direction of back toward the Launch Control Center at the VAB, so... ok.

And that should be quite enough Electrical nonsense for even the hardiest of souls, so let us now move back into the Real World, far from the realm of Evil Spirits and malicious Haints which inhabit copper wires and the things they attach to.

And as it just so happens, the Antenna Platform on the FSS actually does have a bit more interestingness to it, structurally, and that's because it's got those heavy posts that the dish antennas are attached to, and those antennas will want to catch the wind, which can forcibly move them around if you let it, and we don't want to let it, so they went and put bracing underneath each of the posts to prevent them from bending back and forth, and that bracing has the typical look of common diagonal bracing, except that its right there, directly under the Antenna Platform, and if you're not paying attention, you might think those braces are there for the Platform, just like a zillion other knee-braces we've seen all over the place everywhere else. But they're not. They're not knee-braces. The Platform is just fine without 'em, and does not need them in the slightest, as knee-braces or otherwise.

And back to 79K24048 sheet S-116 we go, to see how that works, with all four of the section cuts (one 'A', one 'B', and two 'F's, which total up to only three elevation-view sections on the drawing) that were taken from 79K24048 sheet S-115 highlighted and labeled, letting you see that those "knee-braces" are no such thing, and instead are there to keep the Antennas from wandering around in a strong breeze.

And oh yeah, we also get to see that damnable cable tray that started this whole thing by keeping us from being able to see where the Hurricane Lock (Remember that? Been a while, huh?) tied back to the FSS in our photographs of the GOX Arm and Vent Hood lifts, although, in inimitable 79K24048 style, they only give it to us in Section 'A' and over at the Hurricane Lock on S-115 they pretend it's not there, so it doesn't show up in Section 'F'. Or 'B' either, for that matter. Barf.

79K10338 sheet S-62, which is part of the original FSS construction, and was erected by Wilhoit before I first showed up at the Pad, also shows us the "backwards" knee-brace deal, and in addition to that it shows us the hocus little ladder crossover-stile deal that you used to go up over the top of the big Pipe Diagonal to gain access to the Antenna Platform itself.

Take note of the ⅜"x2½" flat-bar construction of the "handrail" that extends 3'-5" on-center above the little grating panel there. Those flat-bars were kind of twangy, and would move a little bit side-to-side in your grip while you were holding on to 'em going up and down on either side of this thing. Going up and over, right there on the corner of the FSS, way the hell up there at 280'-0", there was sufficient clearance to go over the side if you took a misfortunately-awkward fall right there, and it was never the most confidence-inspiring thing in the world, and the Antenna Platform itself was kind of cramped for space, and the Elevator Machine Room was up there just above you on the FSS side of things looking ugly and blocking the view, and yeah, you could walk the length of that Antenna Platform, and of course I was careful to leave a few of my own bootprints on it too, but all in all, it wasn't the most wonderful of places to go, despite looking like it might be, and once they put the Antennas on the Posts, then it got really crowded up there, and... there's better places to be than the Antenna Platform, ok?

And of course it's the little things, right? Zillions and zillions and zillions of little things.

Each and every one of which holds the power to trip you up and cause you to believe things that can never be true. Or maybe just kill you, outright.

One more item, and we'll get the hell out of here for good. I promise.

This one has nothing whatsoever to do with GOX or Arms, or Hoods, or Locks, or any of the rest of it, but it lives up here, and we're up here now, and I do not want to come back here again later, so...

Met Booms.

Two of 'em, in fact.

"Met" being short for "Meteorology."

And we love 79K24048 sheet S-115 so much that we're gonna go right back to again.

Maybe it will tell us enough about 'em to understand 'em?

Maybe.

Let's give it a try.

So here you go, 79K24048 sheet S-115 yet again, this time marked up to show you the pair of Met Booms that lived up there near the top of the FSS.

More Junky Stuff.

Even junkier than the Hurricane Lock.

And I have zero direct recollection of these things too, and as with the rest of the "junk" up here, that's because I never paid it the least mind, and that's because it never interested me, and now, all these years later, Today Me is more than just a little bit disappointed in Yesterday Me for not having done a better job of finding a way to become interested.

That, and the fact that the work down at Pad 41 was more and more and more drawing me in, and taking me away from Pad B as it did so, and I only have one pair of eyeballs, and that pair of eyeballs could only see what it was surrounded by at any given time, and anything that wasn't visible, wasn't going to get seen and...

...much was missed along the way.

Sigh.

And the Met Booms were another one of those items that got short shrift photographically, and yes, they do show up in a couple of photographs (which you've already seen both of), but no, they don't show up in any of my photographs well, and even the best of them are exceedingly poor for visualizing the two Met Booms, one near either corner of the tower, northwest and southeast, much at all, beyond simply being able to discern that they're at least there.

So I guess I'll need to get those images and do what I can with 'em to help you pick this stuff out, and then after that, we can go to the drawings to see what we can learn about 'em (keeping in mind... 79K24048).

Here's Image 120 which is the last in the series showing us the Beanie Cap Lift, and which you've already seen a pretty good ways up above these words on this page, but this time it has been faded-out to let you see the labeled FSS Side 1/2 Met Boom a little better. Not "good," but at least "better." This thing ties back to the GOX Arm Latchback Strongback Columns, and the place where it does so is obscured by the GOX Arm in this image, so... we do the best we can with what we've got, right?

The Met Booms (both of 'em) were pretty flimsy-looking (Again, only in comparison to the look of everything else on the towers. They were in fact quite strong, quite stiff.), and were made out of 2"Ø Schedule 40 pipe (which, if you ever pick a piece of it up, you will immediately understand the strength and stiffness of) in a funny triangular-aspect truss assembly, and were 16'-0" in length from their pivot point back on the tower to the small piece of angle iron on their tips where the actual instrumentation was attached to 'em. Owing to the way they tied back to the FSS in each location, they were constructed slightly different from one another, but the sense of things was the same for both of 'em.

They could be unlocked from their service positions by removing the pin which otherwise held them in place, and swung around from where they stood out away from the FSS, to get retracted back against the tower, and I would imagine that would be to allow the techs to do maintenance work on the instrumentation that would otherwise be unreachable (without a Skip Box or something similar to use for access).

So here's 79K24048 sheet S-117 to let you see how that works.

And here's the Electrical version of the FSS 280'-0" Plan View, on 79K24048 sheet E-424, including Detail 'D' that calls out the instruments used for keeping an eye on wind speed and direction, and yeah, that too was pretty serious business, because if the wind was blowing too hard in the wrong direction, the Space Shuttle could, among other unpleasant wind-induced things, drift into the structure immediately following lift-off, and that would be a Bad Thing.

This stuff recorded and read-out in real-time, and was monitored closely, on a screen at somebody's console in the Launch Control Center on Launch Day. In all of my photographs, the Wind Vane and Anemometer do not show, and I suppose they went ahead and put that stuff on the tower after we handed it over to 'em, and it became Operational, and a fair bit of end-use GFE (Government Furnished Equipment) got installed and tested at that time.

Back when we were enjoying our Family Day, watching the second-ever return of a spaceship to its original launch site, on Page 63, we got to see "a bright-eyed six-year-old standing in a place beyond imagining, beyond happy to be there," and in the distance behind him, the RSS on top of the Pad formed the backdrop, with the FSS standing above, and below, the RSS, directly behind it.

And this, by sheerest good luck, provides us with our second image, poor-quality though it may be, of our Met Booms, and in this one we get to see them both. That original image I just linked you back to on Page 63 could use some help, so I attacked it, and I beat the living hell out of it, but only in the immediate areas of the Met Booms, and I blasted the contrast to HELL, and then blasted it again and with that bit of violence done to the original image, I put labels on it, so as you could have no doubt about these things. Compare the "enhanced" version of Image 085 with the one you just saw. The Booms are there in the original, but I'm sure you'll agree that they... need a little "help," eh?

And here, and now, with the joy-filled eyes of a radiant six-year-old fresh in our mind, and heart, we shall take our leave of this area, and move on with an elevated spirit, to whatever might be coming next.

MacLaren's Images and Stories Pad B Stories - Table of Contents

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