Third in a series.
The deeper you look, it is hard to overstate the significance that Seal Beach and its residents played in the defense and aerospace transformation that has changed the world.
Not only did men and women who still live in Seal Beach play critical roles in the formation of critical technologies, but in many cases their work became the genesis of technologies even they could not imagine.
For example, long before Apollo, Seal Beach resident John Robinson was part of the team that worked alongside famous rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun at Rocketdyne. The engineers struggled inside their Canoga Park facilities to solve critical problems associated with thermal dynamics so that rockets could go deeper into space.
Von Braun is today remembered for his brilliance in the development of the V2 rocket, the Germans’ first intercontinental rocket. Although his rockets wreaked havoc in World War II, the Soviets and the Americans, though allies, were already locked into early stages of a cold war to conquer outer space.
With the war ending, both sides raced to find all of the German scientists. Von Braun and his team were on the top of both countries lists. The Soviets and Americans quietly engaged in an aggressive battle to capture him.
Von Braun, who died in 1977, is credited with the development of the sophisticated rocket engines that powered the earliest stages of space flight and later, the powerful rockets that powered men to the moon and back. “I can lick gravity,” Von Braun once said, “but the paperwork is sometimes overwhelming.”
Robinson, who graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in mechanical engineering, came out to California in 1959 at the suggestion of a classmate. Soon, he was employed by Rocketdyne and tasked with working out problems associated with rocket dynamics. That’s when his path crossed Von Braun’s.
He remembers Von Braun coming to the facility as the haggard engineers tested various propulsion configurations. “We did not have analytics like they do today,” he remembers. They had to build test engines, fire them, then deconstruct the burn to find out what worked and more importantly, what didn’t.
“We had no computers,” remembers Robinson, at least none that were then capable of solving the problems associated with the changing pressures of space. To figure out the algorithms or changing space pressures, “we used slide rules mostly,” he said.
Rocket engines are composed of a pump, a thrust chamber and a nozzle. As fuel burns, expansion pressures are much greater on earth and begin to exponentially expand as a rocket reaches sonic mach and beyond. This is the reason the engines on Stage 1 are different than those on Stage II and higher, he said.
Moreover, said Robinson, they also learned that different fuels are required to combat “combustion instability” as the rocket lifted off. Rocketdyne and Von Braun determined that while boosting a rocket into orbit, liquid oxygen and a kerosene blend called RP1 worked best. As the rocket began to pull away from earth’s gravity, however, the rocket required a “higher end” mix of fuel to compensate for the escalating ratios. After testing, Robinson said they determined the best mix would be a calculated combination of liquid hydrogen and liquified oxygen.
Robinson later moved from Canoga Park to Seal Beach to work with the various contractors working on the Stage II rocket. He worked in the large building now occupied by Boeing. It was then Rockwell International and later Rockwell before being purchased by Boeing.
Ironically, Robinson’s team’s fuel mix discovery would later become the responsibility of another Seal Beach engineer, Carl Redlin, whose mission it was to separate those two fuels safely within the Stage II of the Saturn rocket. Floyd A. Ancheta, of Long Beach, also worked in Seal Beach for 35 years, was among the few Americans trained in entering the command module following the tragic fire in 1967 that claimed the lives of three heroic Apollo astronauts.
Following the fire, the hatch was redesigned by engineers in Seal Beach and Huntington Beach, and Ancheta, a logistics engineer, led a team of engineers who worked on the processes that properly operate the hatch from either inside or out.
Ancheta also worked in the Rockwell (now Boeing) Building too and would often lead teams to Cape Kennedy. It was his job to oversee the acquisition of parts, the fabrication of parts and Ancheta would literally walk every mile with the Stage II rockets and other parts as they were paraded to the port to be loaded onto barges and ultimately, to lift off in Florida. Like most who participated in the program, Ancheta is retired but remembers his work with much pride and passion.
“I loved it, absolutely loved it,” said Ancheta, who is now 92.
The Apollo project achieved the overall mission of sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to the earth as President Kennedy had ordered in 1962. During its lifespan, the Apollo program achieved many human spaceflight milestones, according to Wikipedia.
Apollo stands alone in sending manned missions beyond low Earth orbit. Apollo 8 was the first manned spacecraft to orbit another celestial body, while the final Apollo 17 mission marked the sixth Moon landing and the ninth manned mission beyond low Earth orbit.
More importantly, the research and development phase of Apollo inspired advances in many areas of technology incidental not only to spaceflight, avionics, telecommunications, and computers, but those advances now touch our lives through medicine, aviation, logistics and much more. Men and women of Seal Beach played a significant role in the development of advanced technologies. Even after Apollo, the incredible aerospace talent pool throughout the region continued to forge new frontiers.
Rockwell, before it was Boeing, built and successfully demonstrated the first functioning Global Positioning Satellite in July of 1977. Few people on the planet today are not touched by GPS receivers, which are today built into the hundreds of millions of cell phones but were not even conceivable before then. Don Reddington, another Seal Beach resident, remembers using cranes to load the early GPS satellites onto cargo planes at Joint Forces Training Base to be flown to Cape Kennedy. He still lives in Seal Beach and has a slight look of bemusement as he glances down at his own phone, complete with GPS capabilities.
Today, Rockwell International (Aerospace and Defense), Rocketdyne, McDonnell Douglas, and many other pioneering companies, famous for their early space exploits, may no longer exist as they once did, even if their spirit, history and technologies (and some employees) still survive.
Following acquisitions, mergers and consolidation that included these companies and others, The Boeing Company has become one of the largest and most significant companies in California, the nation and the world. With more than 140,000 employees worldwide, the company today is vital to the world’s transportation, defense, aerospace, aviation and technology infrastructure. Increasingly, the company is using advanced technology to innovate in many areas of the world.
Boeing still has a major presence in Seal Beach and remains committed to the community, the nation and its future, as we will discover in our next report of this series.
Critically important is that the contributions made by the tens of thousands of brave men and women that worked day and night five decades ago to solve the unsolvable, is not lost on Boeing. “When we went to the moon, most of the Apollo and Saturn vehicles that made it possible were built right here (in Orange County). “It’s incredibly important,” claims Michael Lombardi, Boeing’s Senior corporate historian. In an Orange County Register story, Lombardi claims the valiant effort of these men and women “has changed our lives. “Seal Beach has touched every human in the world today.”
Indeed, our world has been changed forever.
