Calling All Space Nuts

Long ago, in another lifetime far, far away, I used to drive out to Barstow once a week to read the strain gages on deep space antennas. This was in the early 1980s, when I worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in La Canada as part of the Deep Space Network (DSN). The strain gages monitored any unscheduled movement of the antennas, such as might be caused by an earthquake. The DSN was responsible for, among other things, the care and feeding of three giant, 211-foot-diameter dish antennas (enlarged in 1988 to 230 feet) built at Goldstone, 42 miles outside Barstow; at Robledo, Spain; and at Canberra, Australia. These gigantic ears of Earth were built 120 degrees apart in longitude to provide a continuous tracking communications network for space vehicles launched from Earth. The three giant antennas were, and are, the communications gateway for space, the final frontier.

During my many journeys out to Goldstone, I fell in love with the desert, the giant antenna and the Barstow area. I even loved Barstow itself, with its frontier atmosphere and the old, recently renovated Harvey House, where Judy Garland filmed “The Harvey Girls” in 1946.

Fifteen years since my last trip to Goldstone, I decided to visit my three loves once more. My father, an engineer and a JPL veteran of 44 years, went with me. We checked into the 5-year-old Holiday Inn Express on Main Street. The room was small but comfortable, and the complimentary breakfast (juice, fruit, cereal, sweet rolls, coffee, tea and hot chocolate) made a convenient and easy way to begin the day.

The Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex is a 45-minute drive from downtown Barstow. The giant antenna and 11 smaller ones stand on 33,000 acres of desert wilderness leased by NASA from the military reservation of Ft. Irwin. Even though it stands in a military installation where war games are played, the Goldstone desert is like the back of the moon, beautiful, quiet and pristine. Free tours of the antennas can be booked Monday through Friday with Goldstone public liaison officer Barbara Holmes, (760) 255-8555, but require at least two weeks for clearance (more during high security alerts).

Early planning is essential, but it’s worth it. As we drove through the gates of Goldstone, memories of ranging coyotes, flocks of beautifully marked wild partridges called chukars and the changing colors of the desert came flooding back. The tour lasted about 2 1/2 hours and covered a 112-foot antenna and the 230-foot giant that grows out of the desert like an enormous white mushroom. Barbara told us that the antenna could still talk to the unmanned spacecraft Voyager I, launched in 1977 and now almost 6.5 billion miles from Earth on a one-way trip to the stars.

“This antenna is so powerful,” Barbara informed us, “that if you were to hide an apple in the hand of the Statue of Liberty, the antenna could find it in a microsecond.” Twenty-one stories high, the great antenna sits in the desert silence listening to the sounds of the stars. “Live long and prosper,” Dad told the guard at the gate as we left. “Another space nut,” the guard’s expression said. He wasn’t far wrong.

That night, we toasted our past and Earth’s future at my favorite Barstow restaurant, the Idle Spurs Steakhouse on Old Highway 58. The boys from JPL who had designed and built the three giant antennas once hung out here. As a small fountain splashed cheerfully beside us, we watched a glorious pink and orange desert sunset through the windows of the enclosed patio and ate superb sauteed mushrooms and excellent tenderloin of beef with rice pilaf. By the time we left, the night was as dark as the inside of a cavern and the sky was blazing with stars.

The next day we made a transition from “Star Trek” to “One Million Years B.C.” by driving 10 miles east of town to the Calico Early Man Archeological Site. Here, several noted anthropologists have decided, early man lived beside a shallow Pleistocene lake 200,000 years ago. Stone tools have been found encrusted with a calcium carbonate cement upon which the dating is based. Site guide Yvonne showed us around the digs, which stretch in terraced layers up a desolate, rocky hillside.

“This site,” Yvonne informed us, “was originally a betonite mine. That’s a clay used as a lubricant and sealant. In the 1950s, when stone tools started showing up in the layers, Dr. Louis Leakey got interested.” Leakey, famous for his early man discoveries at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, came to Barstow and excavated there from 1963 until his death in 1972. Yvonne made us don hard hats to enter the excavation pits, which run to a depth of 20 feet, down to the ancient clay of the prehistoric lake bed. Embedded in the walls, Yvonne pointed out what looked like a hand tool of red chert and the pointed heft of a stone anvil.

She told us that the site is controversial. “The scientists who’ve dated it are well-known archeologists. But there are some people who don’t accept such an early dating. We’re still looking for organic material to run carbon-14 dating tests on.” At the small visitor center we checked out some of the finds. Had these chipped stones actually been made by man 200,000 years ago?

Both of us were hungry after hiking around the excavations, so we headed down the road five miles to Calico Ghost Town. Calico takes its name from the multicolored rock of the hills that surround it. It was founded in 1881 by workers mining borax and silver; by 1887 the population had reached 1,200 and there were 22 saloons, a Chinatown and a red light district flourishing within the city limits. Rebuilt by Walter Knott of Knott’s Berry Farm fame in 1966, Calico is now a town of shops and restaurants that offers glimpses of its ripsnortin’ past.

We shared cheeseburgers and lemonades at the Calico House Restaurant. Then, as western music wafted from loudspeakers, we checked out the maze-like tunnels of the Maggie Silver Mine, rode the mine train through the back hills, where the “decent” people had lived away from saloons and bar girls, and hiked up to the Scenic Lookout. The leaves of the cottonwood trees and quaking aspen made brilliant splashes of autumn gold against the rainbow rocks and camel-colored sand of the high desert. Haze hung like gauze scrims between distant rows of mountains, plum purple and impossibly far away. Even in the midst of Calico, the desert silence seemed to enclose us like a bubble.

Sunset found us at Rainbow Basin, a national natural landmark, where minerals and wind have turned local clay hills into abstract sculpture in variegated colors. Sickly green seems to predominate along the claustrophobic four-mile loop of twisting dirt road that winds among them. The clays are rich in fossil bones, including the oldest mastodon and pronghorn ever found in North America. The whole span of life on Earth, it seems to me, is spread out in Barstow, where giant antennas, built on the shores of long vanished seas, listen to voices from space, perhaps in the same place where 200,000 years ago, man chipped rock for tools and wondered about the stars.

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Budget for Two

Gasoline: $20.24

Holiday Inn Express, 2 nights: $149.60

Lunch, Goldstone cafeteria: 6.20

Dinner, Idle Spurs: 54.57

Calico early man site donation: 19.00

Lunch, Calico House: 13.25

FINAL TAB: $262.86

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Holiday Inn Express, 1861 W. Main St., Barstow, CA 92311; tel. (760) 256-1300. Goldstone Deep Space Network tours, tel. (760) 255-8555.