DoraLives
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doralives.bsky.social
DoraLives
@doralives.bsky.social
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Writing. Photography. Computer repair and optimizing (get Linux, ok?). Surfing. And above all else, Kai.

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doralives.bsky.social
The Steel Bones of the Great Rotating Service Structure at Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B.

This is what it looked like when we were building it, early 1980's, sitting on the falswork that held it up temporarily, before all of the siding enclosed the Steel Bones, and the falsework got removed.
The Steel Bones of the Great Rotating Service Structure at Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B. This is what it looked like when we were building it, early 1980's, sitting on the falswork that held it up temporarily, before all of the siding enclosed the Steel Bones, and the falsework got removed. It was a VERY imposing thing to behold, and although it looks large in the photograph, it looked MUCH larger when seen in person.
September 1, 2025 at 12:28 AM
doralives.bsky.social
Ok. I took the OAA Lift shot I posted a couple of weeks ago, and LABELED it. Very difficult to research some of it. Not yet done with every teeny tiny detail, but I figure we're in good enough shape to share it with you.

Full-resolution version at this link: www.16streets.com/39-B/Renamed...
Orbiter Access Arm Lift at Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B, Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Union Ironworkers working for Ivey Steel work finish bolt-up of the Arm, which is still suspended by the crane that lifted it. Items of interest which are visible, are labeled, to the extent that I could find rock-solid verification information in the form of original engineering drawings, spanning the period of time between when Pad B was originally constructed for the Apollo Moon-Landing Program in the early 1960's, all the way to the period of time when the work you're seeing was being done, per the 79K24048 engineering drawings which we were using at the time I took this pair of overlapped print photograph images, which I scanned from the photo album which contains them. Some of the labeis are perforce TINY, and it is recommended you click the link for the full-size full-resolution view, which is a .jpg image file that's over 33 megabytes in size. You are standing on the GOX Arm (which we hung earlier) Lower Hinge Access Platform at Elevation 263'-4", which is 257'-4" above the firebricks that line the bottom of the Flame Trench, at Elevation 6'-0", That's a pretty long fall, so be careful up here, ok? When you're leaning way the hell out over the handrail on that GOX Arm Lower HInge Access Platform, without a safety harness on, be sure not to lean... too far, ok? Some of what you're seeing is intact stuff, unchanged from Apollo. some of what you're seeing is modified stuff, altered some from Apollo, and some of what you're seeing is brand new stuff for the coming Space Shuttle launches which will be conducted from this Pad, once we're done building it. Photo by James MacLaren.
May 25, 2025 at 9:02 PM
doralives.bsky.social
Beyond describing, but I try anyway. Click on the Alt text for the image for a few details, or click the link below for all of it.

Hanging the Orbiter Access Arm on the side of the FSS at Space Shuttle Pad 39-B, Kennedy Space Center, back in the early 1980's.

www.16streets.com/39-B/39-B%20...
Image 137. OAA Lift 9 of 9. The Orbiter Access Arm is in place, still being finish-bolted to the Fixed Service Structure by Union Ironworkers working for Ivey Steel, at Launch Complex 39-B, Kennedy Space Center, Florida. You are standing at Elevation 263'-4”, on the GOX Arm Lower Hinge Access Platform, cantilevered roughly ten feet east of the main body of the FSS, looking down and across at the full length of the OAA, which is still suspended by the crane that lifted it into place, as finish bolt-up goes on. Beyond the OAA, over two-hundred and fifty feet beneath you, the Flame Trench with its East Wall in shadow, and the Flame Deflector, it's southern ramp partially shadowed, forms a backdrop, along with the boom of the crane aiming upward and out of the frame, for the central portions of the OAA Truss. To the left, the Environmental Chamber on the end of the Arm is projected against the background of the Pad Deck, and a portion of the sloping side of the Pad, extending out of the left margin of the frame. On the right, the Pad Deck supports the crane, its cab blocked from view by the Arm. Farther right, Union Ironworkers can be seen working the bolt-up. And extending out of the right margin of the image, the mind-numbing complexities of Side 1 of the FSS are visible, forming a sheer precipice over two hundred feet in visible extent. Your location is a gut-churning one, and not everybody can bring themselves to any kind of comfort level in an environment like this. Union Ironworkers do it as a matter of course, daily, and deserve high respect for doing so. This is one of my favorite images among all of them, taken while I was privileged to be working in this amazingly-uncanny place, gifted with sufficient free time to be taking photographs of it as the work unfolded. Photo by James MacLaren.
May 10, 2025 at 9:36 PM
doralives.bsky.social
My old pad.

It's been forty years.

And yet I still miss the place.
Launch complex 39-B at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, viewed from the north, at the public parking at Playalinda Beach, which is a part of the Canaveral National Seashore. You're seeing SLS Mobile Launcher 1, parked on top of the Mount Mechanisms which support it, spanning the Flame Trench, above the concrete of the Pad Body. Three Ares-vintage (a program that only manged one launch before it was cancelled) lightning mast towers surround the Pad, and you can see a time-lapse video of them being erected, when the Space Shuttle's Rotating Service Structure (which I was involved deeply in the construction of) still existed up on top of the pad, in this YouTube vid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwVxjqvHihM On the left, lined up with one of the lightning towers, the Sound Suppression System water tower (which was built during the Shuttle Program) can be seen. To the right, the white sphere of the LOX Dewar is also visible. Between your viewpoint, and the Pad, what appears to be innocuous-enough vegetation fills the foreground. But it is anything but innocuous. It is a ferocious and near-impenetrable life-threatening wilderness of unpleasant plants filled with unpleasant insects, reptiles, and mammals, resting atop alternating layers of muck and mire, interspersed with somewhat more substantial strips of sand. Harsh does not even begin to describe it, but beautiful does. Were it not for the fact that Project Apollo dictated the acquisition of the the great tract of land known as the Merritt Island Launch Area, sequestering it behind a high-security perimeter, it would by now have all been turned into condominimus and tacky commercial enterprises of all stripe and color. In Florida, those who would line their pockets at the expense of the very world they inhabit, never sleep. But neither does NASA, and all shall remain as you see it for the forseeable future. And our lives are improved, thereby.
May 8, 2025 at 7:43 PM
doralives.bsky.social
And sometimes when you're headed out there, the VAB somehow becomes even more enigmatic, and even more gigantic, and all you can do is to just stand there, taking it in, not knowing... how, or why, or sometimes even what.
The Vertical Assembly Building. Where the Saturn V moon rockets were assembled before they... flew. Floating in the far distance above a layer of low clouds, enigmatic, gigantic, incomprehensible.
May 7, 2025 at 6:20 PM
doralives.bsky.social
This is not Mars.

And that a matter-of-fact statement like that would A.) make sense, and B.) seem perfectly sane and understandable, completely blows my mind.

Aeolian beach sand features seen at Ponce Inlet, Florida on April 23, 2025. Photograph by myself.
Aeolian beach sand features seen at Ponce Inlet, Florida on April 23, 2025. Photograph by James MacLaren.
April 25, 2025 at 12:23 AM
doralives.bsky.social
One of the Big Ones. Labeled. Fully labeled. Click the link for full size. Take your time with it. Go slow. Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B, under construction. This is a montage of three photographs I took at the time, and placed into an album.

www.16streets.com/39-B/Renamed...
Spact Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B, under construction by Union Ironworkers out of Local 808, working for Wilhoit Steel Erectors in the early 1980's, labeled. Down in the bottom right corner of the image, that's one of Wilhoit's foremen, Elmo McBee, with his hat pushed down on his face at a silly angle, mugging for the photoraph. A very brief lighter moment in an otherwise extraordinarily difficult and extremely dangerous setting of erecting High Steel, which I managed to capture with my camera. Photo montage by James MacLaren.
April 18, 2025 at 7:10 PM
doralives.bsky.social
Reminded by @dutchspace.bsky.social who posted an image yesterday, of the Last Saturn. And afterwards, the LUT stood alone, unused, destined to be cut up for scrap. Which saddens me. But I was lucky, and I managed to see it with my own eyes at work, and photograph it too, before it was gone forever.
Mobile Launcher 1 looms over 400 feet into the sky above you as you stand on the dirt beneath it at the Park Site north of the VAB. Next to the red Launch Umbilical Tower (LUT) the gray steel structure of the Milk Stool can be seen. The Milk Stool is what the Saturn 1B’s which flew from this ML sat on top of, permitting the use of the ML for a much smaller launch vehicle than the Saturn V’s which it was originally designed and constructed for pre-launch servicing. Photograph by James MacLaren. Mobile Launcher 1, seen here at the Park Site north of the VAB. This is the Saturn V launch platform which the crew of Apollo 11, the first humans to depart this planet and land on the Moon, flew from. Following that, it was modified with the addition of the “Milk Stool” which permitted its use for the much-smaller Saturn 1B’s which took the crews of Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz into orbit. Photograph by James MacLaren.
March 26, 2025 at 1:18 PM
doralives.bsky.social
This is probably cheating, but it's not Star Wars and it's not Star Trek. And it's also a photo that I took myself, bright and early at 7:30am, August 10, 1984.
Space Shuttle Discovery prior to its maiden voyage, seen at Launch Complex 39-A, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA, at 7:30am on August 10, 1984. Photo by James MacLaren.
March 26, 2025 at 1:00 AM
doralives.bsky.social
And sometimes when you go outside one of these guys is across the road, in the field, gathering nesting material, and you run back inside and grab your camera, and you manage to get back outside in time, and you walk across the road to get closer and you get to take a few pictures.
March 17, 2025 at 6:20 PM
doralives.bsky.social
March 12, 2025 at 1:36 AM
doralives.bsky.social
Skeletal RSS under construction, on its temporary falsework, next to the completed FSS in 1980. when Pad 39-B was being modified from Apollo Saturn V to Space Shuttle.

First photo I ever took of it.

NASA seems to have taken none.

Steel fabricated by Sheffield Steel, and erected by Wilhoit.
Skeletal RSS supported by its temporary falsework, next to the completed FSS in 1980. when Pad 39-B was being modified from Apollo Saturn V to Space Shuttle. First photo I ever took of it. NASA seems to have taken none. Steel fabricated by Sheffield Steel, and erected by Wilhoit. https://www.16streets.com/39-B/39-B%20Construction%20History%20-%20Space%20Shuttle%20-%20Contents.html
February 24, 2025 at 12:29 AM
doralives.bsky.social
You are on top of the Fixed Service Structure, 300 feet above the bottom of the Flame Trench at Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on the boom of the Hammerhead Crane, which projects outward to the east of the main body of the FSS.
You are on top of the Fixed Service Structure, 300 feet above the bottom of the Flame Trench at Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on the boom of the Hammerhead Crane, which projects outward to the east of the main body of the FSS. You are looking down the length of the web of one of the two 40-foot-long W24x104's which make up the main body of the GOX Arm Hinges Support Strongback, which is in suspension, held up by the yellow crane which you see a small part of, including the operator through his cab window, far beneath you sitting on the Pad Deck at the bottom end of a black boom which is almost 250 feet tall. High-summer midday shadows in Florida point nearly straight down beneath that which is casting them on elements of the world below. In the top right corner of the frame, the East Side Flame Deflector appears as a gray rectangle above the fifty-foot-high darkness of the East Flame Trench Wall. Immediately below it, the pale steel of the North Piping Bridge spans the Flame Trench, casting its latticework shadow on the refractory bricks that line its bottom surface. In the bottom right of the frame, the softer latticework shadow of the Hammerhead Crane, much farther above, which you are standing on, extends across the Crawlerway surface of the Pad Deck, to and beyond the invisible five-story precipice of the West Wall of the Flame Trench which is betrayed only by the very slight offset in the shadow, near the right margin of the frame. Your own shadow is in-frame, but unseeable, dwarfed into invisibility by the imagination-beggaring scale of that which you are a part of. You are, if only temporarily, part of an Ironworker's World, and it is a world apart, like no other. Anywhere. Photo by James MacLaren.
February 4, 2025 at 10:13 PM
doralives.bsky.social
Dennis Ryder, original shaper for Morey Pope. Hand-shapes. Triplet of Peck Penetrators at Core Surf. As good as it ever gets.
Dennis Ryder, original shaper for Morey Pope. Hand-shapes. Triplet of Peck Penetrators at Core Surf. As good as it ever gets.
February 4, 2025 at 10:11 PM
doralives.bsky.social
Abandoned Settler Shack in Wonder Valley, California.

Hard, ugly, mercilessly-unforgiving desert. The only available water had to be brought up from wells, and it was contaminated with arsenic.
Abandoned Settler Shack in Wonder Valley, California. Hard, ugly, mercilessly-unforgiving desert. The only available water had to be brought up from wells, and it was contaminated with arsenic. Somebody slept on that mattress, long ago. Who was it? What drove them here? What drove them away? The wind and the sun and the cholla and the creosote have nothing to offer in the matter. And the thick silence that fills the air all around isn't speaking, either.
February 4, 2025 at 10:09 PM
doralives.bsky.social
Surf check with Dennis, right after Hurricane Ian exited into the Atlantic Ocean, centered more or less directly overhead. 2nd Light. The shorebreak at high tide. This one might have been head high or so. Nobody out.
Surf check with Dennis, right after Hurricane Ian exited into the Atlantic Ocean, centered more or less directly overhead. 2nd Light. The shorebreak at high tide. This one might have been head high or so. Nobody out. Fairly sketchy setup. Lotta loose dune-crossover lumber moving around in there, most of it hidden, poking up here and there, now and then, complete with nails sticking out of it and other cheerful bonus items. We gave it a pass.
February 4, 2025 at 10:07 PM
doralives.bsky.social
Sebastian Baker, perfect trim, perfect positioning, sliding down and into a place we'd all like to be.
Sebastian Baker, perfect trim, perfect positioning, sliding down and into a place we'd all like to be.
February 4, 2025 at 10:03 PM
doralives.bsky.social
What it's like out there some days.

Clearwater Beach, going off.
What it's like out there some days. Clearwater Beach, going off.
February 4, 2025 at 10:01 PM
doralives.bsky.social
You've got mail.
You've got mail.
February 3, 2025 at 12:44 AM
doralives.bsky.social
Lisa holds her crystal ball up to the sunrise.
Lisa holds her crystal ball up to the sunrise.
February 3, 2025 at 12:41 AM
doralives.bsky.social
I used to live in this thing.
I used to live in this thing. No electricity, no water, no nothing. 200 feet up a cliff via a path covered with dangerously-slick moss-covered rocks. After dark, if you were at the bottom of the cliff, you stayed there, and if you were at the top of the cliff, in the bunker, you stayed there, too. To attempt a traverse at night was to attempt suicide, and since I always wanted to go surfing the next day, I never attempted a suicidal traverse after dark. Best home I've ever lived in. By far. Bar none. It's where I lived when the events in this story went down. https://16streets.com/MacLaren/Travel%20and%20Surfing/Hawaii/Waimea/SoloWaimea.htm And a lot of other stories, too. No end of radical goings-on that you'll never know of. I still miss the place. It overlooked the stretch of coastline from Log Cabins, through Rockpiles, Insanities, Off The Wall, Backdoor, and Pipeline, and in the far distance to the right, as you looked toward the ocean, you could see Sunset Beach. Very handy for sizing things up and getting a proper idea as to what to do, once I was down at the bottom of the cliff, retrieving my board from its hidden stash place in the tall grass down there. Abandoned World War II gun emplacement. After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec 7, 1941, they very reasonably freaked out and built stuff like this all over the place on Oahu. And by 1972, when I first moved into it, all of those bunkers had become long unused, and were fair game for people like me to move into and live there in splendid isolation, far above the unseeing world below. Photo of me in my previous home taken by Link Earle during my first return to it after moving out in 1973, during a visit in 2015. Thanks Link.
February 3, 2025 at 12:34 AM
doralives.bsky.social
Claude Codgen exiting Narragansett Surf and Skate. Rhode Island Soul. Just about as classic as it gets, all the way around.
Claude Codgen exiting Narragansett Surf and Skate. Rhode Island Soul. Just about as classic as it gets, all the way around.
February 3, 2025 at 12:31 AM
doralives.bsky.social
There's a lot going with this picture, which was taken in late 1975.
There's a lot going with this picture, which was taken in late 1975. The red board on the bottom, a 9'-0" shaped by, I think, "Brian Kanegi" (never met the guy, always wondered who he was, 'cause he shaped one hell of a big-wave gun) with white foam showing instead of a glass job on the deck, was my favorite board of all time out there, and is the one I'm riding in all of the (very few) old Hawaii shots with me on a wave. The next one up from the bottom is a yellow longish six foot, or shortish seven foot (it got shorter as time went on, as more and more of it was bashed off of the nose and tail in a variety of misadventures). Don't know who shaped it, and I never liked it very much, and only rode it when I had to, when my other boards were broken. The top board, a 7'-6" Petrillo became mine just a couple of days before this picture was taken when I suffered an overhand throw all the way out onto flat water, trying to go left on a fair sized day at Log Cabins. Came up from one hell of a thrashing (repeated bottom bounces with flips and spins in between) to see a guy on the beach shooting me a peace sign. Uh, sure, peace baby, whatever. I shot him a peace sign back. Except that when I got to the edge of the water, I could see that he wasn't shooting me a peace sign at all. He had two fingers uplifted to indicate that my BORROWED board was now in two pieces. Lovely. Just lovely. So I had to buy it. Phoo. The board on the right, bottom-up with no fin, wound up as my big wave replacement for the red one, which never was brought back to life after it lost its glass job on the deck. No recollection of who made it. 8'-10" if memory serves, and the loss of the fin was kinda scarey. Nice size day at Sunset, came up from a far-too-late takeoff pole-axe beating and the fin was sticking straight up out of the deck of a guy's board, who got cleaned up by the wave that got me, right in the middle, like it had been stabbed with it in a knife fight. Whoa!
February 3, 2025 at 12:21 AM
doralives.bsky.social
But then on other days...

...I feel more like this.
But then on other days... ...I feel more like this.
February 2, 2025 at 7:54 PM
doralives.bsky.social
Some days...

...this is exactly how i feel.
Some days... ...this is exactly how i feel.
February 2, 2025 at 7:52 PM