Michelle Salyer:                Welcome to Outside the Box with BRPH, where we discuss the most innovative, interesting, and outside-the-box solutions to some of the most exciting and challenging projects in the world of architecture, engineering, design, construction, and mission solutions. You’ll hear directly from the problem solvers at BRPH as we dive deep into the latest news, trends and topics in aerospace, defense, manufacturing and industrial, commercial education, entertainment and hospitality. I’m your host, Michelle Salyer, and I’ll be your guide as we open the lid on these topics and more, and invite you for an insider’s look at one of the most successful, fastest-growing employee owned AEC firms in the United States. Welcome to Outside the Box with BRPH. As BRPH wraps up its 60th year in business, we often refer back to our roots in the aerospace industry and our support of NASA’s Apollo program. But how did the firm go from a small startup with three engineers and one architect to one of the world’s premier providers of spaceport infrastructure?

Three of the men who helped shape the past, present, and future of BRPH are with me today to share their recollections of that journey and to talk about what those accomplishments have meant to them. With me today are Andy Miller, a structural engineer who joined BRPH in 1982, Art Waite, a structural engineer who joined the firm in 1986 and retired in 2020 and Brian Curtin, a mechanical engineer who now serves as BRPH’s CEO and chairman of the board, among these three gentlemen, is about 100 years of collective experience in the aerospace industry, touching virtually every spaceport in the United States in one way or another. Welcome, Andy, Art and Brian.

Brian:                                  Thank you, Michelle.

Andy:                                   Happy to be here.

Speaker 4:                          It’s a real pleasure to be part of the podcast. Thank you, Michelle.

Michelle Salyer:                Great, great. Well, let’s jump in. So with this 60th anniversary taking place this year in 2024, we’ve talked a lot about BRPH’s founders, Ernie Briel, Harry Rhame, Mickey Poynter, and Lyle Houser. They, of course, first set the direction to pursue aerospace work back in 1964, and each of you were fortunate enough to work directly with them, particularly as the company was really establishing its aerospace roots. So Brian, you’ve been with the firm about 34 years now. I imagine you of all people as CEO feel the pressure of continuing the legacy that the four founders started. So tell us a little bit more about working directly with them. What’s one message or core value that they instilled that you still try to uphold for the company?

Brian:                                  Oh, thanks, Michelle. Yeah, well, of course, Ernie was a real heavyweight. He was the champion that we had for our aerospace work. It was a real love and passion for him. He knew everybody in aerospace, the launch side, the maintenance side, just pretty much everybody. He was well known. And then for Lyle Houser, Lyle was pretty much the, I’d say the project executive back then for all of our projects, especially for Kennedy Space Center. So the two of them, they really instilled this passion for aerospace as well as the high quality work we had to do. Back then of course, it was all man spacecraft, and so the amount of redundancy, the amount of careful attention to detail we had in our designs, it really affected everything we did here at BRPH.

Michelle Salyer:                Fantastic. So Andy, you started at BRPH fresh out of college, and you are now the longest running BRPH employee at over 42 years. So what was it like back in the early days of BRPH for you? Do you remember your first projects and how did those early days shape the rest of your career?

Andy:                                   Well, thank you, Michelle. The most interesting thing that is that I started my interview here at BRPH with Lyle Houser, and he showed me some drawings of Launchpad-39B, and I almost instantly knew I want to be a part of that. So that’s why this has been my only job my entire career at BRPH. The company was only like 40 employees back then, and we’ve grown considerably since then. But that was my start, and there was a couple jobs that I remember fondly as my beginning aerospace projects, and one of them was the Astrotech facility in Titusville, And then the one that Lyle Houser showed me the drawings of LC-39B, and that was some of my early work, and I really got my feet wet as an engineer on that project.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. We’ll talk a little bit more about Astrotech in just a few minutes. Art, I want to talk to you a little bit. You came to BRPH with a few years of experience from Pan Am and from other places, but you’ve spent your entire career in aerospace. I understand that the McDonnell Douglas Pad-17 was a pivotal moment in your career and also in the history of the firm. So tell me a little bit more about that project.

Art:                                      Actually, that was shortly after I got here that we got a phone call from someone who just stopped somebody on the roadside at Kennedy after work one day and said, do you know anybody can help me? So the reputation of BRPH, Ernie and Lyle and Mickey and Harry preceded him. So that precipitated phone call here, and they said, we just won the MLV-II contract. Okay, what does that mean? We’ve got a longer booster. Okay, what does that mean? We need a new facility. Well, why don’t we do something a little innovative instead of tearing down what you’ve got, just jack the thing up and put 20 feet of new structure under it. So that was like ’86, ’87 timeframe.

But the work was well received. So some years later when they were going to develop the upper stage engine, they would later using Delta IV, they had a new rocket, the Delta III, they needed to test that engine, prove it out for the Air Force. They were also going to larger GEMs, Graphite-Epoxy Motors, which are lighter weight, bigger in diameter, but they still had inventory for the original Delta II. So they needed to modify Pad-17B to accommodate things that they had never had out there before. They had liquid oxygen, didn’t have liquid hydrogen, they had the bigger motors. They also had four fixed hoists and two bridge cranes, which were very expensive to operate. So we came up with a plan whereby we were able to replace all of those with a single bridge crane and a rather novel deflector shift that could push a wire rope cable out of the way to move boosters where they needed to be to attach them to the core vehicle.

Michelle Salyer:                Wow, you have an incredible memory.

Art:                                      I was there. But to accomplish that, we completely gutted that tower, put in all new platforms that are now hydraulically actuated, which got rid of all the cable stays and hard stays, things that created traffic around the floor space. So it was much more user-friendly, a lot easier to operate. Only one crane to test every time you’re doing a critical lift extended the fut. So we could put in the liquid hydrogen system. They were very concerned about acoustic energy reflecting off the pad. They hadn’t had this problem before. But with the bigger engines and the longer burn time to develop the initial thrust from the core booster, before you knock the solids, they said, we want to capture this acoustic energy. They don’t want it reflecting back off of the pad and damaging either the spacecraft or the guidance navigation control system.

So at their suggestion, we put, was it not only 20 foot wide and 18 foot tall, 150 foot long tunnel off the east end of the structure to capture that acoustic energy that would go down through the pad deck and reflect off the flame deflector. But they also had concerns about what they called the Mach 1 flame tip dancing round on the launch pad and causing trouble. So we put in two additional tunnels, a bit smaller, 120 degrees apart so that as the rocket drifted, as it lifted off the pad, that acoustic energy would be captured and directed away from the launch vehicle. So my friend Andy here, came up with an innovative idea because the mobile service tower actually rolled back and forth to do a lot of the lifting.

Well, if you’ve got two fixed objects on the way, that’s kind of difficult, just doesn’t work with physics. So he came up with a design of a mobile piece of those flame ducts made out of steel that’s out on the same rails as the MSD, and then that could be pushed out of the way when they’re doing stacking operations and brought back into place to help capture that acoustic energy later. Then at the 11th hour, the acoustonauts decided they weren’t so sure about their thought process on capturing this energy, and they asked us to come up with an acoustic capture mechanism using water. Pretty standard procedure. I’m sure you’ve seen it.

They used to dump some water from rain birds on the pad, but that was just for cooling. So this thing, they needed to actually entrain the air so that all that energy would go automatically downward into the flame ducts. But rather than putting in a very expensive, very tall water tank, Lyle Houser came up with the idea of getting four 8,000 gallon storage vessels, filling them with water, and they had a lot of surplus GN-II. So instead of using a gravity head, we used GN-II pressure blanket on that water and the sequencer about 13 seconds before launch at T minus 13, it would kick on a program, it would open up a solenoid water. The gas would start flowing, push the water through that, the T minus 10, it hit the pad deck, starts entraining the air, and so then with liftoff, everything was good. That worked.

Andy:                                   Now that was quite the challenging project. So you would wonder what 40 years of experience entails, but that was one of my most challenging projects with all the pressures and the movable parts and making that all work as one. It was really fun actually as a structural engineer to do.

Michelle Salyer:                Would you say that future launch pads have all built off of that knowledge or is everyone completely different?

Andy:                                   I’d say they’re quite different because the way they handled the acoustic environment, I mean, one thing that we learned on that one was they actually filmed the rocket taking off and they could actually see the flames reflecting off the surface and coming up around the rocket as it was leaving the pad. And that’s what they wanted to avoid, and that’s why we made all these modifications to make it much, prevent the vibrations from shaking the payload apart.

Michelle Salyer:                Wow. Let’s talk a little bit more about the work at Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. I know that the shuttle program spanned more than three decades beginning in the late seventies. Let’s talk about what that meant for BRPH both at the start of the shuttle program and at the end of it.

Brian:                                  Just one quick one. So Andy had mentioned about Pad-39B. Of course, that was one of the two Apollo Saturn five rocket pads, and so when it got converted for a shuttle, we got the 39B one and somebody else got 39A, and for 39B, that was really a big moment for BRPH and that we went from that small, from a 40 that Andy mentioned up to a couple hundred folks, most of them residing out there at the pad for several years. Just an awful lot of work. If you’ve seen the difference in the look between an Apollo Saturn five stack and the shuttle stack, you know exactly all the changes that had to be made to that pad to get it off. So all of that work was BRPH. We did all that to launch the shuttle, and that really got us to another level with NASA, with Kennedy Space Center, with our engineering prowess. That led to a lot more work throughout the rest of the space industry.

Andy:                                   Back in that day, we weren’t using computers to draw with. Everything was done on drafting boards. So that’s one of the reasons there were so many people involved because I was actually drawing on Vellum, Mylar, and it was quite a different environment than we have today.

Michelle Salyer:                Well, so I know that the work at Kennedy Space Center not only included launch pads, but many processing facilities and so on. Let’s talk about some of those projects.

Brian:                                  So a couple of things. So with the launch pads, it’s a real specialty of BRPH, but another one is a payload processing facilities or any kind of clean room high base. So we’ve done a number of those here at Kennedy Space Center. We’ve done almost all of them, quite frankly, but we’ve also done them at the other flight facilities too. So for Kennedy, we did a number of really good ones. [inaudible 00:12:30] about the one we started with, I guess the payload fairing cleaning facility.

Art:                                      Yeah, that was for the Titan program, and that’s flying some very, very expensive and complex satellites, DoD components. We’re talking at that time, probably 500 million for one satellite. Now it’s more like a billion. So it’s very critical that you keep things like your electronics dry and your optics clean because you can’t very well go back up in space and repair something. If you find you’ve got a drop of oil on your lens, you’re 300 miles up. So Martin Marietta came to us to design a precision cleaning facility. So they would receive the payload bisectors. Most of them come in two pieces nested.

So it could take those apart, rotate them to vertical, and then clean every square inch of it inside and out before they bring a spacecraft over to encapsulate it. So that was kind of an early, basically straightforward. We didn’t have any hazardous capability in there, but we learned from that. And I, slightly prior to that, or about the same time, Astrotech was a visionary as far as commercial aerospace. So they created, as far as I know, the first commercial payload processing facility anywhere. BRPH was fortunate enough to get that design project and help oversee the construction that was located in Titusville, and then that led to us getting their job out at Vandenberg for their first commercial facility out there and learning, taking our lessons learned as we went through these things and different methods of processing, we were able to parlay that into another payload processing facility at Kodiak Island, and then more recently, one up at Wallops Flight Facility for the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority.

So each and every one of them is a bit different in their capabilities, how you deal with hazardous commodities, hypergolic propellants used in the upper stages or to control the movements of the satellites, you have to be able to contain those in the event of a spill. So that’s not just something you run through glass or through soil pipe. It has to be very specialized stainless steel, double wall piping because of environmental concerns. Got to capture that all somewhere, dilute it, get rid of it safely. Another thing we learned, there was a part of the 17 work, McDonnell Douglas and later Boeing, they bought them, needed more space out at 17, there was a facility there called Payload Spin Test Facility. It was actually a NASA owned facility. NASA said, you can have our stuff, but you need to replace it. So that led to what became known as the PSTF, Payload Spin Test Facility, dash R, replacement.

See, you want to keep your facilities clean, you don’t want anything that’s going to trap dust, dirt, air, particulates, whatever. So I think this was Lyle’s idea at the PSTF-R, which is built behind Kennedy Space Center headquarters. We’ve got some pretty deep columns holding this building up. Why don’t we put some catwalks in the interior wall space so we can run all of our commodities, our GN-II, our GHG, our electrical piping, and just penetrate the walls at the point of use. So that created a very clean facility. So over the years, we kept taking all these lessons learned and rolling them into the next facility and into the next facility.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay, great. Tell me a little bit about the component refurbishment facility. I understand that was a big one for BRPH as well.

Art:                                      It was. It was a Greenfield site. The space shuttle has a lot of moving components, and it’s got a lot of hoses, had a lot of valves as you can imagine, and these things needed to be precision cleaned. The facility they were operating in had been repurposed and done poorly, had a lot of asbestos issues. The fire sprinkler wasn’t up to code, and they were very crowded for space. So we came up with a design on to replace that with what was two phases versus component refurbishment where they would physically take these things apart, take a valve off of the shuttle, take a hose, break it down into the smallest components, precision clean them, replace all the soft goods, the valve seals and whatnot, repackage it, put it back together, bag it and tag it as they called it, put it on the shelf for next use.

Okay. Beyond that, the second phase was the chemical analysis. You don’t just take fluids and put them on the shuttle or into spacecraft. So they had to do titrations. They had a lot of other, I think they even had argon and krypton and some other exotic gases that they used. So this turned out to be a rather large facility, but it was state-of-the-art for them at that time and allowed them to do a much better job of cataloging what they had, not tripping over each other. And in fact, I think that was probably the first time we did a Class 100 cleanroom, not Class 100,000, which is pretty much the industry standard, but very precision because you’re dealing with human life. It had some pretty interesting characteristics.

Brian:                                  Yeah. That Class 100 cleanroom that was, we tried to do it where we use less energy. So we kept that cleanliness, which is really like a Class 10, quite frankly, with half the airflow, which means you only have to use one eighth of the power. So it was only using 12.5% of the power of a typical Class 100 cleanroom. So it was a great savings for NASA. And then the second component of that was like you say, the chemical analysis. And for that, it was a state-of-the-art facility with variable flow hoods and some of the pressures that were being used for some of the testing that you’re talking about. We were using like 15,000 PSI to test the valves. And then for the leak testing, of course, we’d use helium because it’s the smallest molecule other than a hydrogen. And so there was some very exotic, it was a very exotic state-of-the-art cutting edge facility, and it was for NASA, so it was the best of the best.

Andy:                                   The interesting thing, Brian, is that things come back around because now those air conditioners and those units are so old that NASA’s replacing them, and we were involved with their upgrades recently.

Brian:                                  Yeah, that’s truly amazing. That’s 30 years from when we started to now we’re doing it right now, so we’re back at it again.

Michelle Salyer:                That’s so interesting. Andy, tell me a little bit about the VAB. I know we’ve done quite a bit of work at the Vehicle Assembly Building.

Andy:                                   Oh, for sure. It’s the tallest one-story building around back in its day anyway, so that building is like 500 feet tall. So we’ve done numerous projects there. One of the early ones was to standby to stack. So they actually took the orbiter, that is one component of the space shuttle, the actual part that looks like a airplane, and they needed a place to bring that into the VAB and get it prepped so that it could be later rotated to vertical and mated to the external tank. So that was one large project, and then that was in High Bay 4.

And then High Bay 2 right next to it, they also needed a place to bring a fully stacked space shuttle and it’s mobile launcher in case there was a hurricane. So not all the processing bays, there’s four of them would be available. They could have other stacks going on in those bays, and they needed some place to protect a very expensive space shuttle and roll it around back into the High Bay 2. The problem was that High Bay 2 had been converted to other purposes at that time, so we had to bring back and put the pedestals in for the mobile launcher as well as rework some of the platform framing so that they could access the space shuttle while it was in there.

And also the crawler way leading into that high bay had been dug up and ruined, and so it had to be refurbished also. Those are really neat projects. And then one of the biggest jobs as a structural engineer was for us to model the entire VAB in structural modeling software to do analysis. So if you can imagine back when that was originally designed in the sixties, the software available back then was very different than what is available in the two thousands. So we basically took ownership of the VAB as far as structural modeling and put all the different components together and put the wind loads and the floor loads so that NASA could modify it and bring it up to whatever standards that they wanted to with that one analysis model.

And one of the main things they wanted to do was to take out some of the Apollo Saturn platforms that they were using to access the space shuttle, and that was called the Constellation Program at that time. They wanted to completely pull out those platforms and put in new adjustable and movable platforms, and we designed that in brand new software, and it was all modeled in 3D, and then all of a sudden the program got canceled. So that was a perfect design, what we like to say, when a project gets designed and never gets built.

Michelle Salyer:                It would’ve been great.

Andy:                                   Yeah, it would’ve been great. And then a couple other projects would be the transfer aisle crane. There’s 175 ton crane in the transfer aisle that we completely refurbished because it was 60 years old and it needed to be redone. And then everybody sees in the movies the launch control center, and you see all this-

Michelle Salyer:                Where the countdown happens.

Andy:                                   Where the countdown occurs, and all the people are there monitoring different systems. Well, you can imagine the electronic technology that’s changed since that was done for the Apollo program. So that needed to be completely refurbished and changed out with new electronics, and we’re proud to be a part of that.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. So what we see on TV and movies is of the launch control center, that is BRPH’s work as well.

Andy:                                   Yes, it is.

Michelle Salyer:                Oh, very cool. I did not know that. Very interesting. So quite a bit of work at Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. You mentioned Wallops a little bit earlier. Let’s talk about Wallops or Virginia spaceflight facility. Tell me a little bit about the work that we’ve done there and how that got started.

Art:                                      Back in the late eighties, my desk phone rang when we had desk phones, and I picked it up, said, “this is Art Waite” said, “Art, this is Deke Slayton.” “What can I do for you, Deke?” And that began a pretty good relationship. He was another visionary. He didn’t dwell on the past. He was always looking to the future. And he wanted to develop some commercial rocketry, not just payload processing, but let’s put a rocket up and let’s launch it. And by the way, I need this facility to be relocatable. We don’t have a whole lot of money, so if I want to launch it Wallops this week, which is where his starting point was, then I need to move it to the Cape or to Vandenberg.

We can do that. So we kicked about several ideas, and then with some of the stuff we’d learned at Vandenberg about proximity of small rickety-looking buildings to the launch environment, rather than having a very expensive mobile structure, we’d fix it and provide what we called clam shells. These are modular units that had your fixed floors on them and some folding platforms supported on the ends by some latticework. And then back at the fixed tower on the corners with some hemispherical bearings. So you could rotate through 180 degrees. We oriented the corner of that tower towards the launch mount, so that would shed the acoustical energy away from the launch vehicle. That actually worked.

Michelle Salyer:                That was your idea? That clam shell structure?

Art:                                      [inaudible 00:24:22]. And it worked out pretty well for them. It also led to us being involved in designing most of their mechanical ground support equipment for physically handling the boosters, doing the breakover, payload transporter, some other odds and ends like that. We designed a crane that would telescope, so they could pick up a payload in one place and translate it somewhere else. So that was pretty exciting stuff. But that was the first truly commercial launch pad that I know of. Later that led to a call from Alaska saying, “we like what you did there. Can you help us here?”

And what we did at Alaska, we again, developed from what we learned on this first one, made that a little bit bigger, bigger and better, also generic for handling multiple vehicles. And then when the state of Virginia wanted to become a spaceport, they called us and said, what can you do? So we adapted the Alaska structure to what became Pad-0B at Wallops. They didn’t have much money at all so it came, we got the foundations in and the support buildings and the launch mount flame deflector, and then a temporary structure, which became permanent as so many temporary structures do, but it’s been expanded upon. I think Andy can probably tell you a little bit about what’s happened there recently.

Andy:                                   Yeah, we’ve taken 0B and modified it so that they can bring in larger vehicles, and the plan is to actually have some new mobile service structures built to put there. There’s that work as well as at 0D, which is another pad that they squeezed into this tiny peninsula that they launch off of at Wallops. And that one’s all for Rocket Lab to launch their vehicles from. So we’ve done that modification as well as another pad, it’s called 0A, which we’ve modified for liquid fuels. So it’s really interesting to have so many different types of launch pads at one area squeezed together right on the ocean in Wallops.

Michelle Salyer:                So tell me more about what’s happening at Kodiak these days as well.

Andy:                                   Well, Kodiak is continuing to launch many different types of rockets. So we started out with the one launch pad, and then we quickly went to a second launch pad, which was just a flat pad where they could bring in smaller vehicles. And then they went down one of the ridges up there and created five or six new launch pads for all these different commercial companies that want to come and use a clean area to launch from. And it’s been very interesting to see how the infrastructure really can adapt to different types of commercial launchers. And that’s what’s unique about Kodiak is they have different pads for different launch vehicles and people can come in and basically get the space they need to launch from.

Art:                                      It’s very different than it’s a state-owned and operated launch pad. Most everything else is associated with a federal range. Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority is located on Wallops Flight Facility, which is a NASA range. Space Florida is doing their work predominantly on the Air Force side and the Kennedy, not sure what’s going on commercially out of Vandenberg anymore, but Kodiak is truly unique in that respect.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. Good point. Interesting. And I understand we are doing work at Vandenberg, Mojave and pretty much all the spaceports, is that correct?

Andy:                                   Yes, we are. I mean, we’ve got work going on at Vandenberg for a number of the launch companies. We’re hoping to get more payload processing work out there eventually, because we did several modifications to existing facilities, and there’s lots of possibilities there at Vandenberg and Mojave, we’re doing planning for them, master planning to help prepare for a new wave of vehicles coming out of that facility. And we’re working in Texas and Maine and Michigan, and then there’s a number of facilities around the world that are getting ready to launch vehicles, also.

Michelle Salyer:                Exciting.

Andy:                                   Yes.

Michelle Salyer:                It sounds like there’s a great deal to look forward to here at BRPH and throughout the space industry. We’re going to pause here and continue with part two of our special Spaceport history episode next time on Outside the Box with BRPH. Thank you Art, Andy and Brian, we’ll see you next time. Thanks for joining us today for Outside the Box with BRPH. We hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode as we explored some of the most innovative and challenging projects and the most pressing issues and trends in the AEC world. Learn more about us at brph.com. Email us at [email protected] and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and X. You’ll find this podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Be sure to subscribe so you’ll be notified when new episodes are posted. See you next time on Outside the Box with BRPH.