Space Age Icon to Fall to Earth

It was the first major U.S. rocketry laboratory in the postwar era, a 300-foot-tall steel structure that looked more like a gigantic Erector set than a major rocket testing site.

But at Vertical Test Stand-1 in Simi Hills, scientists experimented with the nation’s first large rocket engines that would propel man into space.

Now, the landmark in the west San Fernando Valley is slated for demolition later this year. It will mark the end of an era in American space exploration.

“VTS-1 was kind of a milestone in the country’s rocket history and is now going to dust with the other machinery of its time,” said Charlie McKeon, a retired engineer for Rockwell International’s Rocketdyne Division, who serves as a consultant to the company. McKeon joined Rocketdyne in 1953 at the height of rocket testing and worked at the site.

Rocketdyne officials said the company is razing Vertical Test Stand 1--VTS-1 as it is commonly called--along with 174 other outmoded facilities, to cut overhead costs. Rocketdyne spends about $30 million a year on taxes, licensing and maintenance of the sites even though they have been dormant for years, said Jerry Gaylord, manager of special projects in Rocketdyne’s environmental health and safety division.

“The buildings have no value to the company anymore,” Gaylord said. “They are in disrepair and look terrible and we’re trying to get rid of that eyesore.”

Towering VTS-1 stands dormant along with its defunct successor, VTS-2. Owls, snakes and coyotes live in its landings and beneath its massive flame bucket. Thigh-high weeds poke through gratings and concrete. Rust covers the paint, worn thin by weather and heat, on the giant metal structure.

It was 40 years ago, during the early days of America’s rocket industry, when the test stand awed aspiring scientists and became the testing ground for warhead engines, early developments of Mercury and later spaceship engines.

It was a nail-biting time for those involved in rocket technology as workers sweated out the early tests before the rocket engines rolled out of the 2,700-acre site and roared into space.

“This was a pioneer test stand that ran a pioneer rocket system” for the United States, McKeon said.

With an increased interest in developing rocket power after World War II but little knowledge of how to build test stands, officials at North American Aviation, Rockwell’s predecessor, copied German sites. Even pieces of the German Pennemunde plant were used in the construction of VTS-1, according to Rocketdyne records. Pennemunde was the testing ground for the German V-2 rocket missile that bombed London repeatedly from 1944 to 1945.

“We had our most tremendous successes and our most tremendous anomalies there,” said Bill Vietinghoff, 66, who was in charge of combustion facilities for Rocketdyne in the 1950s and ‘60s at VTS-1.

During the Cold War years, Wernher von Braun and other German rocket experts became regular visitors, helping to analyze the V-2 engine and advance American rocketry. During the late 1950s, as many as five rocket engines were tested each day at VTS-1 as the United States intensified its competition to get a man in orbit before its Soviet adversaries.

The rocket engines were hoisted 75 feet in the air and then mounted on stands to be monitored by various gauges. Liquid oxygen and hydrocarbon fuel were fed from tanks above and the flames were caught by the giant chutes below.

During testing, the booming vibrations from the thundering engines regularly rattled homes throughout the West Valley, sometimes prompting homeowners to call police. Balls of brilliant orange and yellow flames could be seen from several miles away on Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

“You were dealing with high levels of power we were never used to and your body would shake sometimes when the engines were being tested,” Vietinghoff said.

Scientists also worked on the Air Force’s Atlas and Thor intercontinental ballistic missile programs.

The greatest testing achievement at VTS-1, and one of the last before it was decommissioned in the early 1960s, came in 1957. The structure was used to test the Redstone rocket engine, a 75,000-pound thrust engine that was used four years later to launch Alan B. Shepard Jr. into space.

However, with each new generation of rocket engines came the need for more sophisticated testing sites. By the late 1960s, VTS-1, VTS-2 and the Horizontal Test Stand were phased out.

The HTS was demolished long ago, but because of sentimental reasons, Rocketdyne employees asked for a fence to be erected around VTS-1, said Paul Sewell, spokesman for Rocketdyne. There was talk about reopening VTS-1, but that never happened.

Damile Metal Supply of Los Angeles will take the testing site apart at no cost and will keep and recycle the steel, Gaylord said. Once the demolition is complete, all of the roads, concrete and asphalt will be removed and the area will be restored to its natural state.

“We took the area away from the tarantulas and the deer and all the wildlife and now they’re going to reclaim it,” McKeon said.