The dish moved away from the sun and everyone retreated, not knowing for sure from what.

Individual steps in the march of technology just don’t attract the notice today that they used to, when anything new could be expected to eventually show up in the stores as a labor-saving device.

Today’s advances tend to show up as small blips on giant organizational charts, and so don’t give much cause for excitement.

One such step has been taken in the hills above the San Fernando Valley. And, with what turned out to be undue optimism, the Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International provided a bus Tuesday to carry journalists to its Santa Susana Mountains test facility to see something new in action.

What the people at Rocketdyne are beaming about is a successful test of a solar generating system that will produce electric power for America’s first space station.

Rocketdyne, working with a team of four other contractors, has solved the problem of how to keep a solar turbine turning while the space station lies in the shadow of Earth for 30 minutes out of every 90-minute orbit.

The trick, if I understand it, lies in a heater described in a press release as consisting of “117 one-inch diameter, four-foot-long nickel canisters, each filled with about 1.7 pounds of lithium hydroxide, which has a melting point of 870 degrees Fahrenheit.”

During exposure to the sun, the lithium hydroxide melts. Then, while the space station is blocked from the sun, it hardens again, transferring its stored heat into the gas that drives the turbine.

That may not be the whole trick, but it helps to give the picture.

I had never seen Rocketdyne’s test facility and would have jumped at any excuse. But, aside from a colleague from The Times’ Valley business section, the only others who showed up were reporters from the Los Angeles Technical Journal and a Simi Valley paper, one free-lance writer and a Channel 4 television crew.

Early in the morning our nearly empty bus pulled out of Rocketdyne’s plant on De Soto Avenue and soon was winding along a mountain canyon that is rapidly being filled with large houses of a Victorian-Spanish-Tudor-Modular-Country-Modernist blend.

The public road ended at a guard station with a flashing red light. A man in uniform waved the bus along.

It stopped in a village of corrugated buildings, intricate arrays of pipes and cylinders and large structures on scaffolds.

Six men in dark suits waited for us. They were Rocketdyne executives.

Soon a second bus appeared and about 30 men and women, all in dark business attire, stepped out. They came from the other members of the team--Ford Aerospace & Communications Corp., Sundstrand Energy Systems, Harris Corp. and The Garrett Corp.

We were ushered into a small auditorium.

George Hallinan, the program director, gave a short talk while an assistant showed charts and diagrams on an overhead projector.

Hallinan said the team had wrestled with the technical questions and had come up with a hybrid power system combining photovoltaic cells with gas-driven turbines powered by reflected solar heat.

Hallinan, a gray-haired, ruddy-faced man wearing a gray flannel suit with a black and red paisley tie, spoke in a kind of hybrid English, relying heavily on abbreviations such as PMAD, for power maintenance and development.

“The optimum is really a scenario,” he said, explaining how the decision took into account the growth of the space station over time. “It’s really a complex power-growth profile.”

At the end, he asked for questions. There were none.

Then we all filed back in the buses and were driven to the test site.

There, 60 chairs were arranged on a parking lot facing the reflector. It was a dish formed of 328 rectangular mirrors and measuring 36 feet across. It was aimed away from the sun. A set of green welder’s goggles was waiting on each chair.

On command, the disk turned with a low buzz.

As it moved toward its focal axis we were instructed to put on our goggles.

Everything became green and hazy except the heating element, which was glowing white. Hallinan said it was 2,000 degrees.

In a few minutes the dish moved away from the sun and everyone retreated, not knowing for sure from what.

In a corner of the yard, the companies on the team had set up a display of hardware they each build.

One was a small steel cylinder that looked like an air tank. It was actually a nickel hydrogen battery built by Ford.

Anthony Pietsch, a senior project engineer for Garrett Pneumatic Systems Division, was enthusiastic about his company’s turbine engine.

He said it turns at 24,000 revolutions per minute and can run for years without wearing out because it spins on gas-film bearings that offer virtually no resistance.

I asked if I could spin it.

Pietsch was sorry. Because no gas was being pumped into the bearings, they could easily be damaged, he said. To prevent that, the turbine shaft was held in place by a set of pads.

Soon we reboarded the bus and returned to the Valley, where friction is still a force in everyday life.

Someday I’d like to know the feel of a frictionless wheel.