Fewer Rocket Engine Experiments : Test Site Loses Some of Its Thrust

In a concrete bunker on a crest in the Santa Susana Mountains, two men peer through binoculars and out of green-tinted glass that darkens their faces.

In another bunker, computer consoles wait to record what is about to happen. Between the two structures, a huge metal scaffold embraces a rocket engine. Its nozzle’s wide end faces downward, shrouded in vapor. A countdown begins: 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2.

Instead of the beauty of flight comes a frightening concentration of sheer power. A rocket launch is quick drama. Not so a test of a rocket engine, which goes nowhere. The fire is a constant column of energy, a shivering reddish spike roaring into a deep metal pit. The scene is repeated once a week at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, owned by the Canoga Park-based Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International Corp.

Since 1947, the engines for almost every American rocket program came to life for the first time amid the sandstone and sage of these rough mountains.

The site’s history parallels that of America’s space program, its controversies as well as accomplishments. Engines that drove a manned flight to the moon were tested here, and so were those poised to carry the nuclear warheads of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

It was one of the places where German rocket scientists who had worked for the Third Reich came after World War II, giving a former enemy their expertise during the Cold War. One of those scientists, Wernher von Braun, a dominant figure in America’s space program, was a frequent visitor at the Santa Susana site.

“It has been the major rocket engine test site in this country; there is no question about it,� said Ray Tjulander, who runs a 14-man office that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration maintains at Rocketdyne.

He talked about the testing of engines for rockets with such well-known names as Jupiter, Atlas, Gemini, Apollo-Saturn and the space shuttle, which is the company’s focus these days.

The site, with its spectacular view of the Simi Valley on one side and the San Fernando Valley on the other, is a 20-minute drive northeast of Rocketdyne’s headquarters near Canoga Avenue and Vanowen Street.

In some respects, it is a world away. The main access to the test site is Woolsey Canyon Road, which winds through rock clusters that look like small Mt. Rushmores without faces. Often, white-bodied tanker trucks carrying liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen and other chemicals grind up the road.

The fenced facility, located on more than 3,000 acres, costs more than $14 million a year to operate and has a staff of 350 technicians, engineers and scientists. A security force of about 40 people guards it and patrols its 17 miles of roads. No one can enter without a corporate identification badge. Employees’ cars are stopped and thoroughly searched.

“Classified documents,� one guard said when asked after a search of a car what he was looking for.

The main road continues past the guardhouse around hillocks and small valleys and through a natural bowl made by the rocks and hills. Everywhere, there are huge steel scaffolds, resembling launch pads. There are 23, some more than 60 feet high. Fifteen are in use, the others are empty, the roads to them cracked and broken, frequented more often by the

bobcats, raccoons, deer, rattlesnakes and tarantulas than by people.

“They are relics of a bygone era,� Tjulander said of the abandoned scaffolds.

“There was a period in the 1960s when the level of activity was very much higher than it is now,� said Tjulander, explaining that solid fuels have replaced liquid propellents as the main fuel for military missiles. Since then, Rocketdyne, which concentrates on liquid-fueled engines, has lost most of its military business to other contractors. The military prefers solid fuels because they ignite faster and have a better battle response, Tjulander said. The space shuttle engine runs on liquid fuel.

At the height of the Cold War, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, there were up to eight large rocket tests here a day, company officials said.

But Rocketdyne tests more than rockets in this place that employees affectionately call “Susie,� or “Santa Sue� or “The Hill.� In one of the drab, gray complexes scattered among the hills, laser experiments are being conducted as part of the Reagan Administration’s “Star Wars� space weapons program. The buildings, which seem too worn and run-down to have so advanced a technological purpose, can be entered only with high-level government security clearance.

Asked about another simple structure bordered by chemical storage tanks of various sizes and shapes, an engineer giving a tour of the facility said, “In some companies, there are some people who do some basic research for the government and nobody really knows what they’re doing. They’re our mad scientists. Even I don’t know what they’re doing.�

Then, after a pause, he said, “It’s called the Experimental Chemical Laboratory. I know what they’re doing, actually. I don’t want to talk about it.�

Energy Production

Atomics International, a division of Rocketdyne, experiments on the site with various types of energy production, such as geothermal energy and coal gasification projects. It also salvages used enriched uranium and other radioactive fuels out of nuclear reactor components. The used fuel is stored at the site in underground concrete vaults up to 20 feet deep before being shipped out of state for reprocessing.

Along with rocket testing and secret experiments, much of the work at the Santa Susana field lab is focused on the storage and control of potentially dangerous forces, be they lasers, radioactive fuels or rocket chemicals.

Toxic and explosive materials are stored everywhere, contained in sausage-shaped vessels or round domes or bunkers buried half in the ground and painted red. There are signs everywhere that ban smoking, urge caution or say: “Danger. Stay Out.�

There are indications, however, that the controls over the materials used here have not always been adequate.

On Jan. 13, 1959, there was a major accident at an experimental nuclear reactor on the site, which Atomics International operated for the Atomic Energy Commission. According to Marlin Remley, a nuclear physicist and Atomics International’s director of safety who did a technical review of the accident, 13 of the reactor’s 43 fuel rods were ruptured or melted as a result of overheating. The reactor had to be shut down.

“We had an increase of radioactivity inside the building, but no releases off the site,� Remley said, adding that the company was not aware of any harm to employees.

In a 1979 article about the incident, Theodore B. Taylor, a member of the president’s commission on the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident, told The Times: “It was a messy accident, but I’m not aware of any evidence that it endangered the public.�

The public apparently knew little about the accident until the 1979 story, although Remley said the company contacted local newspapers in an effort to publicize it.

On Superfund List

The Santa Susana Field Lab was recently put on a state Superfund list of 180 sites where toxic wastes from past spills or improper storage methods may threaten the environment or public health.

An official with the state Department of Health Services said that the state has limited information about the degree of the potential hazard at the site. The official said the Superfund listing was based mainly on the discovery of elevated amounts of trichloroethylene in ground water. The chemical, a solvent used at Santa Susana for degreasing rocket engines, is a suspected carcinogen.

Pat Coulter, director of communications for Rocketdyne, said the company was aware of little traces of trichloroethylene in ground water at the site. “We’re cleaning it up,� he said. Rocketdyne officials said they are generally vigilant about environmental protection.

Site for Movie Filmings

In appearance, the Santa Susana Field Laboratory not only conforms to the classic Hollywood vision of a remote haven for futuristic, secret experiments, but in many cases created it.

The makers of “Star Wars� filmed computer consoles in Santa Susana control rooms. Directors looking for an isolated test site in which to place the Six Million Dollar Man, Bionic Woman or even Barnaby Jones and Cannon have chosen the site. Rocketdyne also invited in the creators of a movie called “The End of the World.�

In the 1930s and most of the 1940s, the acreage was used to film Westerns. Cinematic cowboy hero Tom Mix fought his pistol duels among the same rocks that would later surround rocket testing. Back then, open space and orange groves surrounded the site. As one Rocketdyne engineer said: “The nearest stoplight was on Reseda and the closest market was in Van Nuys.�

In 1947, North American Aviation, as Rocketdyne was then called, leased approximately 300 acres of the land. The company eventually bought that property and added to it. Then came the first project: dismantling and analyzing a V-2 rocket engine.

The V-2 had been one of Germany’s most guarded military secrets during World War II. It was developed on an isolated island off the Baltic Coast called Peenemunde. With Germany facing defeat, Wernher von Braun ordered a 32-year-old aide named Dieter Huzel, now a Rocketdyne retiree living in Woodland Hills, to hide the documents recording the rocketry work. As the story is told in a book titled “Project Paperclip,� written by University of Texas historian Clarence Lasby, Huzel hid the documents in an abandoned mine shaft.

Huzel, Von Braun and others turned themselves over to the Americans on May 2, 1945. The scientists and the documents were brought to the United States. Most of the scientists went to work for the government, and from there to government contractors. Huzel and several others ended up with North American Aviation.

‘Saved a Few Years’

“The documents established a solid basis, theoretical and engineering, for the design and construction of large rockets in the United States,� Huzel, a white-haired 72-year-old, said in an interview. He spoke in a thick accent while flipping through a photo album that included pictures of himself in a German military uniform. “It saved a few years of costly development,� he said of the research he and his colleagues did during the war. “Gradually, new information replaced the old.�

In 1949, a company history says, an experimental engine based on the V-2 was fired for the first time from the Santa Susana site. “From this moment the space dream gleamed,� the history says.

Some worried about the darker aspect of that gleam at a time when the main purpose of the company’s research was to propel nuclear weapons.

“There were a lot of people talking about whether we should be building rockets at all,� said Bill Baisley, 63, an electrical engineer who started working at the Santa Susana site in 1950. “People left because they didn’t think we should be building them.�

Baisley, a small, soft-spoken man, smiled and said, “And that was before we had any warheads that fit on them. There were no nuclear warheads light enough to put on those things.�

Baisley’s recollections are full of detail about rocketry’s risky early days. “There was a concern about the unknown,� he said. “And there were a lot of unknowns.

“Liquid oxygen, alcohol and peroxide were our propellents. We knew they had a high energy release, but we didn’t really know how to control them or how they would react. We went through a lot of hardware in those days. You burned holes through engines. You blew their sides off. You had fires. I don’t remember anybody getting hurt.�

Baisley said that because of intense governmental pressure to make progress with rockets, a failed rocket launch at Cape Canaveral would be followed by a flurry of testing activity at Santa Susana.

43 Tests to Find Error

He remembered that toward the end of 1953, one of the first launches of a Redstone rocket failed dismally when propellents burned a hole in the engine. The rocket fell on its side and blew up. “What had gone wrong? We had 43 tests to find out,� he said.

An engineer at Santa Susana discovered the solution by mistake. He failed to stick to instructions for wiring an engine test and rearranged the ignition process, Baisley said. This time, the test succeeded.

Baisley remembered a scene in a rented sedan driving between Cape Canaveral and Miami in 1954. With him in the car were Von Braun and Konrad Dannenberg, another German rocket engineer who worked at Rocketdyne as a U.S. government employee.

“Konrad and Wernher were talking about the possibilities of space, and Wernher said to Konrad that he was going to start writing articles to sway this country to start getting interested in space.�

The nation, of course, was swayed, but with a lot of help from the Russians and their launching of the Sputnik satellite on Oct. 4, 1957.

The space race was on. Shortly after taking office, President John F. Kennedy set a goal of making an American the first person to set foot on the moon. The Saturn rocket engines that helped make that happen were tested at the Santa Susana site.

For the past 13 years, the priority at the mountain test site has been on the reusable engine for the space shuttle. NASA has praised Rocketdyne’s work on the engine, but the agency is disappointed in the engine’s high-pressure turbo pumps, which must be replaced after five flights. They were supposed to last for at least 10. Rocketdyne is under pressure to upgrade the component or lose its contract for that part of the engine.

The engine is constantly put through tests, such as one Feb 1. that took John Sullivan, a gruff, longtime engine test site supervisor, to a concrete bunker. During tests, he watches the pattern of the flames for irregularities. Even after the 77,000-horsepower space shuttle main engine ceased, Sullivan peered through his binoculars. No one can go near the engine for 20 minutes after a test.

On a panel near Sullivan was a large red button that he could have pressed to shut off the engine if something had gone wrong during the nearly six-minute test. But he never touched it. When the time was up, Sullivan turned away from the window. There was a satisfied look on his face. “That one went the distance, and it was a beauty,� he said.