Rocketdyne Dismantles Historic Rocket Testing Site

White-hot acetylene torches bite into the steel bones of the abandoned hulk known as Vertical Test Stand-1, cutting apart the rusted cradle of American rocketry.

Rocketdyne is demolishing this relic of the Cold War and the space race. Not because it cares little for history, but because it needs to save money.

U.S. scientists of the 1950s and ‘60s labored feverishly here at Rocketdyne’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory, testing prototype rocket engines that they prayed could beat the Soviets.

Here, they breathed fire into the dreams of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, and designed forerunners of the massive booster engines that still fling the space shuttle into orbit.

But on Feb. 2, demolition workers began toppling the historic five-story rack of thick steel and scarred concrete in a clanging shower of scrap. Later they will dismantle two more stands, where scientists developed the engines that lifted astronauts to the moon.

Rocketdyne plans to save $30 million in upkeep on the 2,700-acre test lab site. The metal will go to the scrap yard, and the open-air test arenas will be surrendered to the coyotes.

For many Rocketdyne old-timers, the demise of VTS-1 cuts deep.

“It’s kind of a monument that’s come and gone, and no one except those few who’ve worked here will realize it,” says engineer Bill Vietinghoff, who tested early liquid-fuel rockets. “It was a prideful thing in its day. It was a symbol of progress, power and technology.”

In the late 1940s, North American Aviation of Long Beach took over a set of rocky amphitheaters in the Santa Susana Mountains where actor Tom Mix once filmed silent westerns.

The company needed a place to bolt a rocket engine into place, and ignite its booming flame without having the rocket fly off out of control.

So engineers modeled the towering VTS-1 on wartime Germany’s rocket lab at Peenemunde. They borrowed an engine design from the Nazis’ deadly V-2 buzz-bomb--along with some of the Germans who designed it.

The military pumped in money and manpower, hammering Rocketdyne into one of the foundries for the Cold War. And Rocketdyne’s ranks swelled with young, idealistic scientists.

“We were just a new bunch of kids, fresh out of the service, anxious to get a hold on the world,” said former instrumentation engineer Clement Cecka, 71, who came to the lab in 1950. “The camaraderie was unbelievable.”

In its heyday, the lab was a tense, heady place. Engineers worked seven days a week and two shifts a day, sometimes three.

Men such as Vietinghoff sweated the design, tweaking bastardized V-2s into new prototypes, seeking longer range and stronger thrust.

Workers such as test engineer Ernie Barrett oversaw a grueling schedule for each engine, monitoring procedures and giving orders to light it up.

Whether engines fired well, shut down early or blew up on the stand, the scientists learned.

They pored over readouts for mistakes and clues. They shipped the engines back down the twisting road to Rocketdyne in Canoga Park, and tried again.

Would another fuel burn hotter? Stronger? What if we tighten this valve or reshape that thrust chamber, add another pump? Can we beat the Russians? Can we win?

They tried exotic fuels--ethyl alcohol, fluorine, liquid oxygen chilled to 298 degrees below zero.

They monkeyed with basic design: pumping fuel through tubes inside the walls of the thrust chamber to help cool the engine, or designing side-thrust jets to give missiles a football-like spin.

They relied on primitive test gear--slide rules for complex calculations, vibration monitors and oscilloscopes cannibalized from oil-drilling companies. What gauges they lacked to measure horrifically strong flame and thrust, they built from scratch. “Pushing the state of the art,” they called it.

“There wasn’t anything commercially being built at all,” recalls Barrett, now retired to Canoga Park. “Where are you going to find a store that would handle liquid oxygen, or a valve that could handle 5,000 PSI [pounds per square inch] that you could hold in your hand?”

But when it all worked, when test firings stretched from tense milliseconds to roaring minutes, the rocket men knew they had crossed into uncharted space.

For Cecka, the turning point came in 1950 with the first successful test of the Redstone--a V-2 offspring that carried America’s first nuclear warheads and in 1961 blasted off Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard in the first manned U.S. rocket flight.

“We knew we could do anything after we got that first one done,” Cecka said. “You get that feeling . . . that eventually we could solve any problem.”

In the mid-1950s, spies reported more powerful Soviet missiles. The U.S. test schedule accelerated. More engineers were hired. Scientists stuck their heads inside barely cool nozzles for inspection, then yanked the rockets off the stands and bolted new ones for the next test.

“It was a race to be No. 1,” Barrett said. “If they’re going to launch something, we’d better have something to launch back.”

They developed engines for short- and intermediate-range missiles, and perfected engines for early intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and cruise missiles.

Then, abruptly, Rocketdyne’s main mission changed. Liquid rockets proved too slow for the split-second pace of nuclear war--all that fussing with supercooled fuels such as liquid hydrogen and oxygen.

And as the 1957 Russian satellite Sputnik cast a new shadow over America, Rocketdyne turned to beating the Soviets in space.

“A lot of us were a lot happier when the space program came along,” said former instrumentation engineer Ed Mosbrook, 59, who later helped to perfect the space shuttle booster engines. “You were doing things for science and not with the intention of mass annihilation.”

But the pace was just as manic. At its height in 1964, Rocketdyne employed 9,000 people, chasing President Kennedy’s mandate to put a man on the moon.

Clem Cecka’s task was the thrust engine--no bigger than a garbage can--that had to lift the lunar module off the moon. “When they pushed the button to get off the moon, boy, it worked perfectly. That had to be the high point of my life.”

Rocketdyne still fires engines on some of the old Cold War stands. The rumble of Atlas and Delta rockets for satellite missions often booms down from the hill.

But the rest are bound for the scrap heap--save for a few small chunks of rusted VTS-1 girders that will be “prettied up” as souvenirs for some Rocketdyne workers, said special projects manager Jerry Gaylord. The cost of keeping and insuring the stands is too high, said Gaylord. “We no longer need them.”