Moon Flight Anniversary Is Bittersweet Time in O.C. : Aerospace: Experts recall ambitious era. They now see cutbacks, ended careers and a program in retreat.

Casey Patelski helped Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin make their giant leap to the moon, and the retired aerospace engineer is ready to celebrate the 25th anniversary.

“All the astronauts are still alive, and most of us who worked at Mission Control in Houston are still around, so I figure it’s going to be a big deal,” said Patelski, a Costa Mesa resident who was a flight manager for McDonnell Douglas Corp. in NASA’s Houston Mission Control facility during the first moon shot.

But Patelski and others in Orange County whose efforts led to the moon landing on July 20, 1969 are finding this year’s observance bittersweet, as memories of exuberant years compete with frustration over today’s layoffs and cost-cutting by NASA and the aerospace industry. They remember a period seemingly without limits; today, the constraints of recession and federal deficits appear everywhere, ending careers and extinguishing the grandest ambitions for space exploration.

“Around the country, engineers and scientists are being crudely dumped onto the street” as aerospace companies and NASA scramble to cut costs, said Jerry Rosenberg,executive director of the NASA Alumni League in Washington. “I’d guess that it will be an interesting anniversary celebration.”

Like much of Southern California, Orange County contributed mightily to Apollo and the entire space effort. In the 1960s, the company now called Rockwell International was making the Saturn rocket’s second stage in Seal Beach, McDonnell Douglas was building the rocket’s third stage in Huntington Beach, and TRW’s San Juan Capistrano facility was helping to build the engine that powered the Lunar Exploration Module.

Engineers, factory employees and managers recall workdays that involved a higher calling. Exploring the frontiers of space imposed special burdens, too, from fulfilling the hopes of an attentive public to assuring the safety of astronauts who had become national heroes.

Don Barcus, who joined McDonnell Douglas’ corporate finance staff in Huntington Beach in 1962, tells of employees who worked overtime and weekend hours without complaint and with a sense of mission.

“A man was going to be put on top of that rocket and blasted into space,” he said. “Any time you put a man on top of it, it had to be a quality job.”

The space program was also “peace-oriented, it was pushing technological frontiers, and it wasn’t made to destroy something,” Barcus said. “People loved working on this project.”

Those involved in the program “were almost like heroes,” said Fountain Valley resident Bob Younkin, 55, who joined McDonnell Douglas as an engineer in 1964. “People could identify with it.”

Rosendo Romero, a Buena Park resident who was a welder at McDonnell Douglas for 41 years, said he once labored 36 hours straight to repair cracks in a thick, steel deflector plate at the Cape Kennedy launch pad. Another shift stretched to 30 hours as he struggled to repair a damaged Saturn rocket part and keep the lunar mission on schedule.

“There were constant change orders,” said Romero, now 65. “Welders worked directly off of blueprints, and when changes were needed, an engineer would ‘red pencil’ it on the spot, and the welder would go to work.”

For Romero, the crowning moment came after the lunar landing when he was chosen by his co-workers as their delegate to a luncheon at Houston’s Rice Hotel honoring the Apollo 11 astronauts.

Romero flew home with a souvenir menu that listed Neil Parisienne Sauteed Potatoes, Buzz Miniature Glazed Carrots and Mike Tossed Green Salad, named for astronaut Michael Collins, who remained in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin explored the moon. The menu was signed by all three space voyagers.

“I started welding destroyer escorts in Abilene, Tex., when I was 14,” Romero said. “I never dreamed of (my work) going to outer space.”

The highs and lows of the space effort spilled over into the communities of Orange County, well beyond the factories and offices that served NASA. After hours, aerospace workers celebrated breakthroughs and contemplated inevitable setbacks at eateries and bars like Sam’s Seafood in Huntington Beach.

“They were here for lunch, and after work they were here for cocktails,” said Pat Milavich, 55, who has worked at Sam’s Seafood since the 1960s. “It was a really neat time. Everyone felt that we were making leaps and bounds in every direction. The moon landing was the first step toward everything.”

Apollo 11’s technological achievement, which Los Angeles author Mike Gray has compared to “throwing a dime into a parking meter from three hundred miles away,” inspired people to seek careers in aerospace.

Among them was Winston Hickman, 51, who joined Rockwell International’s corporate staff in the early 1970s.

“We’d been to the moon, and the next stop was Mars,” Hickman said. “It was a real heady time with lots of gee-whiz stuff. . . . After the moon landing, it seemed as if it was all there to be done. We were going to do the space station and then go to the stars.”

Hickman spent 17 years with Rockwell before moving on to Vans Inc., the Orange-based maker of tennis shoes, where he eventually became chief financial officer. But he still professes a fascination with space: “I’m a ‘Star Trek’ freak at heart,” he confides.

Their strong feelings aside, most Apollo veterans acknowledge that the nation now lacks the will to underwrite manned space travel beyond earth orbit. But they do so grudgingly, and they harbor strong doubts about the wisdom of letting the Apollo program die during the 1970s.

“It was a terrible, terrible mistake,” said Duane Johnson, 66, a Stanton resident who lost his engineering job when McDonnell Douglas wound down its Apollo work in the early 1970s.

“That Saturn rocket was a monster,” said Johnson, who drove a moving van for years before finding another aerospace job. “It’s just so sad.”

Patelski, the Apollo 11 flight manager, was also laid off in the early 1970s. He managed to find an engineering job, though for less pay, with Fluor Corp. in Irvine.

“I was bitter about the whole thing,” he said. “I mean, we went to Houston, trained the astronauts, and all we got was a pink slip.”

At the same time, Patelski fears that NASA is being hamstrung by “a lot of guys my age . . . still hanging on,” pushing for manned space flights when unmanned missions are cheaper and more effective.

“We contributed mightily to Mercury, Gemini and Apollo,” Patelski said. “But it seems to me they’re still thinking back to the good old days when we were young. . . . They’ve got to get young, aggressive guys who aren’t stuck with old, Model T thinking.”

Other aerospace veterans express concerns that invaluable scientific information may be lost as those who were on the Apollo team retire and die.

“We’re like the monks in the Dark Ages, carrying a core of knowledge in our heads,” said Jim Ball, 47, a Huntington Beach resident who joined McDonnell Douglas early in 1969 and still does mission simulation work for the company.

Today’s engineers know what certain parts of the Saturn looked like, but they don’t know why engineers opted for those specific designs. Said Ball: “We’ve got to absorb this knowledge to keep it alive.”

He is concerned, too, that today’s schoolchildren appear not to view space exploration as a career possibility.

“As a kid I loved space, I read about Sputnik in the third grade, made a reflector telescope to look at the moon,” Ball said.

On a recent cloudless night, Ball pointed out to his children the area of the moon where astronaut Pete Conrad, now a McDonnell Douglas executive in Huntington Beach, landed during a later Apollo mission.

“I remember looking at the moon in awe,” Ball said. “But the kids were not excited.”

Patelski, however, says he is doing his part to ensure that at least one capable young scientist will be ready when the United States finally returns to space flights beyond earth orbit.

The first of Patelski’s grandchildren to earn an engineering degree will get the bright-red 1969 Camaro that he is painstakingly restoring in his Costa Mesa garage.

“It’s in my will,” Patelski said. “I’ve got five kids, so there’s a good chance that at least one of them will come up with an engineer.”

Orange County’s Contribution

Three Orange County corporate divisions took part in NASA’s quest to put a man on the moon. An overview of the work done here:

* Second-stage rocket: Built and tested by North American Aviation (later Rockwell) in Seal Beach.

* Third-stage rocket: Built and tested by McDonnell Douglas in Huntington Beach.

* Lunar Exploration Module engines: Tested at TRW’s San Juan Capistrano site.

Sources: Individual companies; Times reports

Researched by JANICE L. JONES / Los Angeles Times