Blasting Into the Future
January 10, 2022
This article was originally published in the Nov/Dec 1999 issue of DEMOLITION magazine.
Thursday, October 14th, 1999, marked another important milestone for the nation’s space program. At exactly 10:05 AM EST on a beautiful, sunny Florida morning, Dykon, Inc. of Tulsa, OK detonated approximately 300 pounds of explosives to fall the seven million pound Umbilical and Mobile Service Towers at Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41) at NASA’s Cape Canaveral Space Station.
Completed in 1965 at the height of the Space Race to the moon, the Mobile Service Tower/Umbilical Towers (MST/UT) were part of our Titan rocket launch facilities. The MST was 265 feet high and weighed over five million pounds. The UT was 175 feet high and weighed over 2 million pounds.
Initial construction of SLC-41 was begun in April of 1965 with 6.5 million cubic yards of landfill dredged from the nearby Banana River. The U.S. Air Forced accepted the launch site on December 15, 1965, first using the facility to launch an Air Force Titan-III-C rocket on December 12, 1965.
The pad is a historic part of the nation’s space program. NASA’s Viking 1 and two Mars lander vehicles were launched there in 1975. In 1977, NASA’s deep space probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, still winging their way through the galaxy, were launched from the complex.
From 1986-88, SLC-41 underwent a $57 million renovation in preparation for the Air Force’s Titan IV rocket program. On June 14, 1989, the first Titan IV was launched from the site. After some 27 launched over a 30-year span, its last launch was an Air Force Titan IVB rocket on April 9, 1999.
To understand the nature of the SLC-41, you need to visualize a massive Titan IV rocket. These space transportation vehicles are 112 feet high, 10 feet in diameter, weigh some 1.9 million pounds at launch and can generate 1.394 million pounds of thrust at launch. The Titan IV B/Centaur, an upgrade, is capable of placing payload weighing more than 12,700 pounds into geosynchronous orbit, 22,300 miles above the earth. Even greater weight payloads can be placed in low-Earth or polar orbits by the Titan IV.
Recent Titan launch failures and rapidly changing 21st century technology caused the government to begin its Titan V Rocket program. The first step in this new program called for renovating the old towers so that new launch towers could be built. Lockheed Martin was the government contractor in charge of designing and building the new rockets and their launch platforms.
NDA member Olshan Demolishing was selected by Lockheed Martin’s general contractor, Hensel-Phelps, to carry out the demolition of the two towers. The original plan called for Olshan to pick the towers down piece by piece. The new construction schedule had been pushed back over six months due to investigations of the Titan IV launches.
Time is always a critical path on any project and the Space Industry is no different. Knowing that completion time was a factor, Olshan looked into the idea of explosively felling the two towers. They concluded that by felling the towers with explosives they could shave several months off the completion schedule.
Another deciding factor was safety. It was calculated that explosive demolition would limit worker exposure by as much as 300%. Instead of having workers hundreds of feet in the air, excavator-mounted mobile shears could be used in conjunction with cutting torches to help clean up the steel.
Olshan Demolishing contracted with Dykon to bring the towers down with explosives.
Dykon’s first task was to sell the job to Lockheed Martin and the Air Force. Lockheed quickly agreed that explosives were the way to go on this project. The Air Force and its Safety officers were another story. They were very reluctant to let any blasting take place at their base.
Dykon made an initial trip to the site in order to examine the structures. On the first trip they concluded that the UT was a standard built structural steel tower and could easily be rolled over using explosives. The MST on the other hand was found to have a very complex structure with non-standard framing and massive x-bracing. These towers were built to withstand the blast from Titan rockets as well as hurricane force winds often found in Florida.
Dykon analyzed the structure and put together a blasting plan, engineering calculations and impact study for the Air Force to review. After several meetings with the Air Force, they decided that the blasting thorough plan, along with Dykon’s 25 years of experience felling structures, was what they needed in order to put their stamp of approval on the project. For the first time in 23 years, the U.S. Air Force approved the use of explosives to demolish a structure at Cape Canaveral.
Once all the approvals and paperwork were completed, the work on the towers began. It took six weeks for Olshan’s crews to prepare the structure for blasting. Four days before the scheduled blast, bad weather set in and it was decided that the shot would have to be postponed until the weather cleared. The final cutting could not be completed if the winds were too high. The weather finally cleared and a new blast date was set.
Olshan’s burners began cutting small windows in the supporting columns as laid out in the structural analysis. Once all the burning was completed, Dykon began the task of attaching the over 400 linear shape charges that would cut the steel support columns. The smaller UT tower was loaded first. Explosives would be used to remove the bottom four feet of that tower, allowing it to roll over.
Next, explosive loading of the MST began. An interesting feature of the MST was that it could be rolled forward on a set of railroad tracks in order to service the Titan rockets on the launch pad. The bottom level of the structure was not the conventional beam and column construction that is typically found. Instead, the bottom was made of massive x-braces. Because of this unusual framing, it was decided that the structure must be prepared on the next level up where more conventional framing was found,
A review of a $57 million renovation program completed in 1998 found that most of the structure had been retrofitted with additional steel plates on the flanges of the columns. Large shape charges had to be placed opposing each other in order to cut through these multi-plated steel flanges.
Approximately 15 feet of the front side of the MST was explosively removed. The MST has two large lightning towers on either side of the fall zone that Lockheed Martin needed to save. The direction of fall of the structure was very critical. Over five feet of sand was placed in the impact area of both structures to absorb the fall and save the pad’s concrete slabs for reuse.
Olshan’s crews installed protective plywood boxes around the shape charges and wrapped the boxes with old conveyor bolting. The boxes and belting would help reduce the amount of debris that would be thrown from the shape charges.
Because Florida is the world capital for lightning, a non-electric system of initiation was selected for the project. This system would provide the greatest safety against lightning strikes, stray electricity and radio interference. Dykon began placing the timing mechanisms that would guide the two towers into the designated fall zone and away from the lightning towers to be saved.
Once the two towers were on the ground, Olshan began the recycling effort. It will take them about eight weeks, using four large excavator-mounted shears, to cut the structures into manageable sections for off-site transport to a recycling facility at the Port of Canaveral operated by Yorke Doliner & Co. of Melbourne, FL.
The demolition of SLC-41 provided Lockheed Martin an opportunity to raise some money for one of the local charities by selling raffle tickets for the chance to “Push the Button.” Patrick Olski and his sister Diane were the lucky winners and had the honor of pressing the ceremonial switch at the precise moment the 300 pounds of explosives reduced the two massive structures to a seven million-pound mountain of twisted steel.
As SLC-41 was one of the most historic sites at Cape Canaveral, there had been a bit of sentiment shown about the demolition of the site. But as everyone knows, there is always a price to pay for progress. That’s why the theme of this event was “Blasting into the Future.” And parallels Olshan’s philosophy of “Making Way for the Future.”
The team effort of Olshan and Dykon was the first step in a new space rocket program that will help propel the United States into the new century of space exploration.