Launch Pad for the Space Age : Rockwell Test Site Gave Rocket Science Its Thrust

A few things the man said that long-ago spring intrigued Bill Vietinghoff. Son, the man from North American Aviation began, the United States is racing the Russians to put a man in space and someday, maybe, even on the moon.

Then he asked Vietinghoff to help.

And so it was that Vietinghoff--fresh out of college with a chemical engineering degree, a bedroom set and an 8-year-old Dodge coupe to his name--came in 1953 to help birth the Space Age in the dusty canyons of the Santa Susanas.

Over the next 40 years, North American Aviation became Rockwell International, and Vietinghoff watched as each new generation of rocket engine was born in thunder and fire--rockets with such evocative names as Atlas and Thor, Redstone and Navajo, Jupiter and Delta.

Those were the glory days, when the throaty roars of rocket engine tests rumbled regularly across the San Fernando Valley from the west, and the future seemed as limitless as the heavens themselves.

More than 6,000 men and women spent those intoxicating days and nights on massive test stands shielded from public view by the craggy umber peaks of the Santa Susanas west of Chatsworth.

On a recent sunny morning, Vietinghoff returned to those test stands. Now they are hauntingly quiet, mute witnesses to a past not so much forgotten as taken for granted. Rockets are routine, like cars and telephones. It was so different back then.

“It was just a thrill to come out and witness a test,” recalled Vietinghoff, who was charged with figuring out ways to reduce the high-frequency vibrations that rattled early engines to pieces. “There were people running up and down the stands. They were always either removing or installing a test engine.

“I loved it up here.”

Man made it into space and finally to the moon. With man’s reach within his grasp, the urgency of the future seemed to wane. In time the number of workers at the test facility fell to just over 600. New test stands were built, and the old ones offer few hints of their bustling past.

Weeds poke through cracked pavement. Wind whispers through metal grating. Dripping water echoes rhythmically through flame buckets that once captured the white-hot power of engines often no larger than a V-8.

“It’s nostalgic,” said Vietinghoff, taking in the scene from a high platform. “An era has passed.”

The rocket engines were mounted on the stands so they could be monitored by dozens of different gauges. Fuel was fed from tanks at the top and the flames were caught and tamed by giant flumes at the base.

At the height of rocket engine development in the late 1950s, as many as 17 rocket tests were conducted in one day. Once, seven tests were done in a single day on a single stand.

Deer and other wildlife became so accustomed to the racket that after a time they barely paused at the sound. Rocks around some test stands are blackened by soot.

In a way, the structures seem to fit the landscape of rocks worn smooth by millions of years of wind, covered here and there by the paintings of people who long ago sought to explain the starry sky with myth.

Each corner of the winding roads through the Santa Susana Test Facility brings another vista, another unsettling scene of man’s towers silently guarding the harsh canyons.

Form follows function. The very utility of the structures, their decided inelegance gives them a certain style beyond the obvious jumble of hoses and wires, girders and screens.

Walking through the test stands--their paint worn thin by weather and heat--evokes memories of the men and women who walked these same steps, who checked the now-quaint gauges a hundred times a day and scribbled countless calculations into their notebooks.

Dignitaries such as Charles Lindbergh, Wernher Von Braun and Gen. Jimmy Doolittle came out to see and hear and feel the force and promise of rocket engines being tested.

Even for those who have conducted them time and again, engine tests are memorable events. From their secure vantage points, they see the blast of flame spill out a split second before the mechanical bellow reaches them.

Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water cascade down the flame bucket in an effort to prevent it and the surrounding test stand from melting in the hellish heat.

So much energy is generated that it can be felt deep in the chest. The sound swallows all else. And then, it stops. The silence afterward is said to have been so profound that it is almost suffocating.

Especially in the early days, each test was a gamble. No one knew when or if an engine might blow apart. Technicians would listen intently for the telltale whine that signaled trouble.

“They would start screaming like a banshee,” Vietinghoff said. “We had fires and explosions. We were still learning the characteristics.

“At that point they were trying to find out everything about rocket engines--including how to start them, just how to start them. In the old days, it was like walking on eggs.”

Now, though, the tests are less risky. And they are conducted on more modern test stands where computers monitor every twitch and wiggle.

Even so, technicians still spend hours preparing a single engine for its initial firing.

The newer test stands seem smaller, more compact than their older cousins. The gauges are shiny, the metal clean. The pavement all around is still black and smooth and fresh.

The old stands remain unused, but there are no plans to raze them. One day, perhaps, they will be called again into service, when eyes look skyward and see the frontier once more.