At Rocketdyne, Hiring Has Been Taking Off

A memento of the past, a 20-foot-tall Apollo moon rocket engine, is still parked outside Rocketdyne’s headquarters here.

For most of the decade, it’s been a dark symbol of the hemorrhaging of the San Fernando Valley’s once-mighty aerospace industry. Rocketdyne’s local work force has been savaged, down from 8,600 jobs in 1990 to about 4,000 last year.

Quietly, however, in the past 12 months a hiring boom has swept Rocketdyne, as outer space becomes big business again.

Local employment is up nearly 400 in the past year--mostly engineering jobs--and the company still needs to fill another 250 posts.

Rocketdyne’s recruiters are chasing engineering students at 30 universities and the company has hired 120 college grads in the past year, compared with “only six or seven [a year] between 1991 and 1995,” said Tim Violette, Rocketdyne’s human resources director. “We’ve picked up where we left off in the ‘80s.”

Rocketdyne has also run job fairs in Boston, Denver, Phoenix and Sacramento, and the company is so eager to land the right talent it offers $2,000 to employees who refer candidates that the company ends up hiring.

To grab software engineers or computer specialists, Rocketdyne hotly competes against Silicon Valley firms, DreamWorks, and oil and insurance companies.

But Rocketdyne’s big lure is what it’s offered for 40 years: the exotic challenge of conquering space.

The firm’s comeback started even before Boeing Co. bought Rocketdyne, along with most of Rockwell International Corp.’s aerospace business, last December. It’s been a mix of old and new projects, both military and commercial, that have picked up speed.

For all its recent troubles, Rocketdyne remains a big business, with revenues this year reaching $900 million. Much of its bread-and-butter business is building and maintaining the main engines for the space shuttle fleet, a job that dates from 1972 and produces some 25% of Rocketdyne’s sales. About 35% of the company’s business this year will come from its contribution to the $30-billion international space station.

Rocketdyne is building the space station’s in-flight electrical power complex, a 70-ton system with four solar power panels, each half an acre in size, and a truss of nickel-hydrogen batteries to store electricity. This will provide the power that astronauts will need to assemble the space station in orbit, with NASA’s first crew set to go up in July.

And while Rocketdyne’s fortunes always turned on the whims of Congress, NASA and the Pentagon, this year 30% of sales are from commercial projects, up from 15% several years ago, as it rides a surge in private satellite networks.

Rocketdyne’s ancient booster engines, used on Delta and Atlas rockets dating to the ‘60s, are in hot demand to help launch Motorola’s new $4-billion Iridium satellite system, which will provide worldwide mobile phone service for business customers by late 1998.

A total of 72 Iridium satellites will be launched, usually five per rocket. And of the first 39 Iridium satellites, 25 were fired up by Rocketdyne engines.

This represents part of a worldwide boom in telecommunication systems; commercial satellites launched worldwide have jumped from 27 in 1994 to an expected 200 in 1998. “When they start putting those constellations into space, we hope many of them will go up powered by [our] engines,” said Jim Albaugh, Rocketdyne’s president.

Rocketdyne already has won a role in the vast, $9-billion Teledesic satellite project, created by cellular phone magnate Craig McCaw and financed partly by him and fellow billionaire Bill Gates of Microsoft.

All told, Teledesic will launch 288 orbiting satellites, 850 miles up. McCaw’s dream is that by setting up a tiny antenna, any remote village on the planet can have phone service, and any business customer can tap into phones, e-mail and two-way video conferences on the Internet.

It helps that Rocketdyne’s new owner, Boeing, is Teledesic’s primary contractor, and that Boeing has become a partner, investing up to $100 million.

The first Teledesic satellites are to go up in 2000; and McCaw aims to be in business by 2002. Rocketdyne hopes to be a prime supplier of Teledesic launch engines. But the company is already developing in-space solar power systems for Teledesic’s satellites--on a smaller scale than its space station project--as well as propulsion systems to help maneuver the satellites.

Many Rocketdyne employees gripe that this decade Rockwell paid too much attention to its electronics business and starved Rocketdyne. Albaugh, who worked at Rockwell for 22 years, said, “The fact of the matter was Rockwell was not willing to invest in aerospace and defense. Boeing is. It wants to be the premier aerospace company in the world. I think we can be a big part of that.”

There are other satellite network projects underway, including Loral Corp.’s Globalstar, a 48-satellite system, and Rocketdyne is picking up launch business here. In the next two years 27 Delta rocket launches are scheduled, 19 for commercial jobs, including Iridium and rival satellite networks. (Boeing’s latest acquisition, of McDonnell Douglas Corp., included the Delta rockets, for which Rocketdyne builds booster engines.)

“The business of space is very, very buoyant. And that’s not just building rocket engines; people are buying more satellites,” said Wolfgang Demisch, aerospace analyst for Bankers Trust New York Corp. “So I think Boeing is happy with the Rockwell acquisition.”

Albaugh now talks of Rocketdyne’s revenues leapfrogging 30% by the middle of the next decade, with half its business coming from commercial markets.

So for the first time this decade, the mood is brightening on the factory floor.

Frank Edwards, 62, Rocketdyne’s manufacturing director for the space shuttle main engine, proudly remembers his start date: Oct. 22, 1956, a year after Rocketdyne opened. He also remembers the sting of the ‘90s layoffs, when NASA’s budget was shrinking, and so was his staff.

“We were losing all these new young men and women. When you start losing your young people [in the workplace] it’s like dying.” Now, Edwards said, “this is the best of worlds. Hiring new, vibrant people, and their enthusiasm makes you feel younger.”

Edwards grabs the arm of one of his newest recruits, Ryan Guerriero, 23, an engineer hired three months ago out of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He had other job offers, including a chance to work at Sony on futuristic TVs. But when Guerriero was a child, “I watched the first space shuttle land,” and the magic of space has stayed inside him. “What we do goes up there with the stars, sun and moon. You see a mobile go up in the sky and we build the engine that puts it there. Only one company does that. Lots of companies make cars or potato chips. There’s only one space shuttle engine,” he said.

The walls at Rocketdyne’s Canoga Park assembly plant are covered with American flags, NASA and Boeing logos, and a banner that reads: Cheaper, better, faster. Rocketdyne is pushing hard to do all three.

Factory charts are posted to track individual team performance. Edwards shows off one of the 3,000 parts that go into the space shuttle’s main engine, an elaborate copper fuel channel the size of a kitchen table, with the bottom cut to within 1/2,000th of an inch. He points to a production chart: In the ‘80s it took 21,000 man-hours to produce one fuel channel; now it’s done in 8,000 hours.

For all the recent changes, much of Rocketdyne’s fortunes will still ride with NASA.

A key project is the X-33, a prototype for the next-generation space shuttle. NASA hopes it will evolve into a reusable fleet that can launch commercial and military space payloads at a fraction of the current cost.

The X-33 is designed by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works in Palmdale, with Rocketdyne providing the engine. The unmanned X-33 weighs 136 tons and is shaped like the end of a bread loaf, with wings protruding from the sides. It’s scheduled for a suborbital test flight in 1999 from Edwards Air Force Base, with a landing in Utah or Montana.

If the X-33 works, a full-sized space shuttle replacement--which Lockheed Martin calls the Venture Star--will be tested; again with Rocketdyne providing the engine. Rocketdyne has spent $270 million so far on its engine research.

The Venture Star will launch vertically on its own power, not strapped to a massive rocket like the current shuttle, and will fly back on its own power too, which in theory will make it cheaper and more reliable.

Rocketdyne is also working on a simplified, expendable Delta 4 rocket engine called the RS-68, with 90% fewer parts. It’s intended to help meet an Air Force goal to slash by half the current $12,000-a-pound cost to hoist a payload into orbit.

And Rocketdyne is plugging away on laser projects, including an airborne laser to be used by Air Force 747s to obliterate enemy missiles. It also has a Chemical Oxygen Iodine laser, designed for installation on military vehicles and ships, to blow up enemy tanks and other weaponry.

Tom Ferguson, 42, a Rocketdyne engineer since 1981, keeps seeing new faces in the hallways, and he likes it. “It was dry for years. And the mood is different. Everybody is very busy. People are happy. It’s the good times again.”