If These Walls Could Talk, They'd Say 'Save Me!'

The scoop: The scorched bricks beneath Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center have witnessed decades of spaceflight history. But after a recent space shuttle launch blew thousands of them from the pad, NASA intends to throw these pieces of history away.

If the brick walls beneath Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39A could talk, they might recount the stories of some of NASA's most historic missions over the past 50 years. But part of them may soon be lost forever.

Thirty-nine years ago this July, a Saturn V rocket blasted off from Pad 39A, sending a crew of three men on their way toward the first manned lunar landing.

The powerful exhaust from the 363-foot booster had to be tamed or else risk destroying the pad. So in 1965, when NASA engineers designed 39A, they built the aptly titled "flame trench" -- a 500-foot-long-by-60-foot-wide-by-four-story-deep tunnel to safely deflect the searing flames and smoke away from launch vehicle and the pad.

By July 16, 1969, four Saturn V rockets had preceded Apollo 11 off Pad 39A, and seven more followed. The first and last manned missions to the moon used the same launch pad, as did the launch of Skylab -- the United States' first space station.

Instead of building new pads after Apollo, NASA modified 39A and its sister 39B to support the space shuttle. The original walls of the flame trench, however, were left intact. Following space shuttle Columbia's leap from the same pad in April 1981, an additional 69 missions followed, directing their exhaust down the same tunnel blazed by the moon missions.

Yet on May 31, 2008, as space shuttle Discovery rumbled toward orbit, the intense thrust from the shuttle's two solid rocket boosters tore into a fracture along the trench's east wall. The result: 3,500 interlocking bricks that previously lined the flame trench careened as far as 1,500 feet from the launch pad.

NASA announced a repair plan for 39A on Thursday, citing corroded support brackets and chemical erosion as the cause for the damage. Although the bricks weren't in any danger of hitting the spacecraft, NASA needs to repair the site to support the remaining shuttle launches through the fleet's retirement in 2010. That plan involves removing even more of the original 40-year-old bricks and covering where they were with grid iron bars and spray-on, heat-resistant concrete.

As for the bricks? Because a trace amount of toxic asbestos can be found in each one, they'll be treated and tested so they can be disposed in a landfill.

So after nearly a half-century of serving as the literal foundation to some of the United States' greatest space achievements, these bricks are now nothing more than trash?

Now I can see NASA's perspective: As a government agency, it needs to protect the public's welfare -- and with a limited budget, the agency isn't in the business of creating souvenirs. On the other hand, this is not the first time NASA has been faced with a similar chance to preserve history.

Back in 1981, after Columbia safely returned from its historic STS-1 mission, nearly 150 of its protective thermal tiles were found damaged. The black-and-white tiles are made of silica, which, in its dust form, poses a threat to eyes and lungs. Thus, NASA made it their policy not to distribute the tiles and instead discard them.

Because this was the first mission of the space shuttle, though, the agency broke the heat shield tiles into small, square-shaped pieces and embedded them in acrylic. This created handsome mementos that NASA gave to its mission managers and employees to thank them for a successful flight.

Perhaps surprisingly, this wasn't the first nor last time NASA encased objects in Lucite to protect them -- the agency has used the method to preserve everything from moon rocks to, well, pieces of other launch pads.

According to NASA's space shuttle processing manager Rita Willcoxon, the agency will hire a contractor that specializes in abating asbestos to help them remove the bricks from Pad 39A. She expects the work to be completed by the third week in July.

Given NASA's precedent, I think the agency should take that additional step to find a company to embed the historic bricks safely in acrylic and make them available to museums, educational institutions, NASA employees and perhaps even the public.

It couldn't be a more well-timed tribute to the anniversary of the first moon landing and the agency's celebration of its 50th anniversary.

Robert Pearlman is the founder and editor of the space history Web site collectSPACE.com. The views expressed are the author's alone and do not represent the official position of the Discovery Channel.

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