Rocketdyne

• 1. Introduction

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  Rocketdyne built the engines that carried human beings to the Moon. Based in Canoga Park, a suburb of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley, the company grew from a small division of North American Aviation into the dominant force in American rocket propulsion. At its peak, by 1965, Rocketdyne employed 65,000 people and produced the vast majority of United States rocket engines. Its fingerprints were on every major American space program from the first satellite launches through the Space Shuttle. How a company born out of World War II wreckage came to define an era of human spaceflight is a story that begins not with a visionary founder but with a captured German missile.

• 2. Born from the V-2

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  After World War II, North American Aviation took on a contract from the Defense Department to study the German V-2 missile. The assignment was to adapt its engine to American measurements and construction standards. NAA went further than that. Engineers borrowed the V-2's concept of separate burner-injectors to design a far larger engine for the Navaho missile project, which ran from 1946 to 1958. In the 1940s, this work was considered unimportant and funded at a very low level. The start of the Korean War in 1950 changed that calculus entirely. NAA had already been testing engines at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, high in the Simi Hills, since around 1947. The site sat well above the populated floor of Los Angeles, which made it far safer for high-energy tests than the early sites NAA had been using inside the city. Navaho ran into continual difficulties and was eventually canceled in 1958, when the Chrysler Corporation Missile Division's Redstone missile had caught up in development. But the Rocketdyne engine that had been built for Navaho, known as the A-5 or NAA75-110, proved considerably more reliable than the one developed for the Redstone. The Redstone missile was redesigned to carry the Rocketdyne engine, even though that change gave the resulting missile a much shorter range. NAA spun Rocketdyne off as a separate division in 1955 and built a new plant in Canoga Park, close to and below the Santa Susana test site.

• 3. Atlas, Thor, and Delta

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  Rocketdyne's first all-new engine design, the S-3D, was developed in parallel with the V-2-derived A series rather than after it. The S-3 went to work on the Army's Jupiter missile, itself a development of the Redstone, and was later selected for the Air Force's competing Thor missile. An even larger Rocketdyne design, the LR89/LR105, powered the Atlas missile. Thor had a brief military career but proved its real value as a satellite launcher through the 1950s and 1960s. One configuration, the Thor Delta, became the ancestor of the Delta series of space launchers, though by the late 1960s the Delta had almost nothing in common with its Thor roots. Atlas followed a similar arc. It served briefly as a deterrent weapon before the Atlas rocket family became a workhorse orbital launcher for many decades. It carried Project Mercury crewed spacecraft and formed the basis for the Atlas-Agena and Atlas-Centaur rockets. The Atlas V was still in manufacture and use at the time Rocketdyne's story was being written. The RS-27, originally developed as a single engine to replace the three-engine cluster on the Atlas, became the standard powerplant for most later Delta versions.

• 4. The Saturn Years

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  Five F-1 engines powered the first stage of the Saturn V, the rocket that sent astronauts to the Moon. Rocketdyne supplied all of them, along with five J-2 engines for the Saturn V's second stage and a single J-2 for its third stage. The H-1 engine drove the Saturn I booster's main stage. Rocketdyne's reach extended to planning for the proposed Nova rocket, an even larger vehicle that was never built. By 1965, the year that captures the company's peak employment, Rocketdyne was making virtually every liquid rocket engine in the United States, with the sole exception of the Titan rocket's engines, which were built by a rival company called Aerojet. That figure of 65,000 employees reflects how thoroughly a single propulsion company had become the backbone of the American space program. The company's facilities at Neosho, Missouri contributed to this output. Approximately 1,250 workers at that plant, which began operations in 1956, produced MA-5 booster, sustainer, and vernier engines, as well as H-1 engines and components for the F-1 and J-2. The Neosho plant closed in 1968, and the citizens of Neosho later placed a commemorative monument dedicated to the workers there, honoring what the inscription called their tireless efforts in producing the world's finest liquid rocket engines.

• 5. The Canoga Park Plant

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  In November 1955, North American Aviation completed the main manufacturing building at Canoga Park and formally designated Rocketdyne as a new company division. The plant had been built on 56 acres of land that NAA purchased in 1954 within what is now the Warner Center area; NAA then deeded the property to the Air Force, which designated it Air Force Plant No. 56 and contracted with Rocketdyne to run it. At its peak, the Canoga facility spread across 119 acres and encompassed some 27 different buildings, including over one million square feet of manufacturing area and 516,000 square feet of office space. A headquarters building opened in 1960 at the corner of Victory Boulevard and Canoga Avenue. A pedestrian tunnel underneath Victory Boulevard connected the northern and southern groups of buildings; it was removed in 1973, the same year Rocketdyne repurchased the Air Force Plant No. 56 property and ended its government designation. Six distinct periods of liquid rocket engine work took place at Canoga Park, spanning Atlas production from 1954 through the late 1960s, and Space Shuttle engine production from 1981 through 2011. Key technical advances made there included the gimbaling of rocket engines, the introduction of injector baffling plates for combustion stability, tubular regenerative cooling, and the stage-and-a-half engine configuration first used on the Atlas. When Rocketdyne was sold to Aerojet in 2013, the Canoga property that remained measured roughly 47 acres. Demolition of the former facility commenced in August 2016.

• 6. Solid Fuel and Diversification

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  Rocketdyne's work was not confined to liquid engines. In 1958, the company entered a partnership with the Rocket Fuels Division of Phillips Petroleum to form a company called Astrodyne Incorporated, based at the former Bluebonnet Ordnance Plant in McGregor, Texas. Rocketdyne bought full ownership in 1959 and renamed the operation Solid Propulsion Operations. One significant investment at McGregor was a facility capable of testing engines producing up to three million pounds of thrust. Early solid motor work at McGregor produced gas generators used to start aircraft jet engines and turbopumps, as well as Jet Assisted Take Off engines for aircraft. Engineers there also developed solid propellant boosters for zero-length launches of the North American F-100 Super Sabre and the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. Each of those boosters delivered 130,000 pounds of force for four seconds, accelerating the aircraft to 275 miles per hour and four g before separating. Starting in 1959, the group adopted a propellant formulation using ammonium perchlorate oxidizer combined with carboxyl-terminated polybutadiene binder, marketed under the trade name Flexadyne. For the next nineteen years, Flexadyne propellant powered solid rocket motors for three major missile systems: the AIM-7 Sparrow III, the AGM-45 Shrike, and the AIM-54 Phoenix. Rocketdyne transferred operation of the McGregor plant to Hercules Inc. in 1978. Part of the former Bluebonnet Ordnance Plant is now operated by SpaceX as a rocket development and test facility.

• 7. Space Shuttle and Decline

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  Rocketdyne won the contract for the RS-25, the Space Shuttle Main Engine, at what seemed like the beginning of continued growth. Instead, a rapid downturn in military and civilian contracts through the 1970s and 1980s forced the company into repeated rounds of downsizing. Rockwell International, which had absorbed NAA and Rocketdyne when North American Rockwell formed in 1966 and became Rockwell International in 1973, eventually sold its aerospace entities to Boeing in 1996. Rocketdyne became part of Boeing's Defense division. In February 2005, Boeing reached an agreement to sell what it called Rocketdyne Propulsion and Power to Pratt and Whitney of United Technologies Corporation. That transaction closed on the 2nd of August 2005. Boeing kept ownership of the Santa Susana Field Lab. In 2013, GenCorp purchased Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne from United Technologies and merged it with its existing company Aerojet to form Aerojet Rocketdyne. Beyond rocket engines, Rocketdyne had also developed power generation systems including radioisotope thermoelectric generators, early nuclear power experiments, and the main power system for the International Space Station. When Boeing sold to Pratt and Whitney, that Power Systems division was transferred separately to Hamilton Sundstrand, another United Technologies subsidiary. The Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, taking with it the last major production run that had sustained Rocketdyne through its decades of downsizing. The RS-25 engine, however, was later selected for use on the Space Launch System, carrying Rocketdyne's technology into a new era of deep space exploration.