Newsweek

'Aerospace Valley' Takes Off; SIlicon Valley's RIch Second Cousin

JULY 15, 1985

The Reagan defense buildup brings good times to a patch of California desert.

In time Barbara Little would get used to the desolation that greeted her when she first drove into southern California's Antelope Valley. She learned to appreciate the unbroken expanse of sand and bleak, brown high-desert scrub. She adjusted to its rural isolation. But after 29 years what the city girl from Los Angeles still hasn't gotten used to is the wind--the fierce, unnerving current that whips in from the west, whistles between the mountain ranges and overturns trailers as easily as it blows tumbleweeds across the half-mile-high valley floor. Everyone curses it, yet the ill wind works to the Antelope Valley's good. At Edwards Air Force Base, it smooths the dry lake beds of the Mojave Desert into cement-hard surfaces perfectly suited to space-shuttIe landings. At Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, it creates ideal conditions for flight-testing of aircraft such as the supersonic B-1 bomber. The wind has helped turn the 2,500-square-mile Antelope Valley into Aerospace Yalley--the world's largest assembly, modification and testing center of high-tech aircraft, a sun-seared second cousin to Silicon Valley. It is, says industry analyst Wolfgang Demisch, "the crucible through which aerospace technology passes. " While much of the nation's manufacturing sector is growing, at best, slowly--even the computer industry is in a slump--the Antelope Valley is abloom. Nearly all of the nation's major defense contractors and commercial aircraft makers maintain a presence there, pumping more than a billion dollars a year into the local economy. At the edge of Plant 42, where employment has quadrupled in five years, Northrop is building a top-secret facility to develop the radar-evading Stealth bomber. Nearby, $225 million B-1 bombers will soon begin rolling out of the Rockwell factory at the rate of four a month. In the town of Mojave, the municipal airport has become the nation's premier test site for new civilian aircraft. It is also headquarters for low-budget, "skunk works" operations like General Electric's jet-engine test facility. Low budgets can mean high profits: the various companies doing business at Mojave have $250 million in backlogged orders among them. And at Edwards, where both the jet age and the space age began, test pilots under the command of Col. Steve Stenson along with NASA engineers are exploring technologies that will take American aerospace into the 21st century. On the cutting edge of high-tech aviatlon,Antelope Valleywould seem to be the model of sun-belt growth and prosperity--and the envy of every rust-belt mayor. But its heavy reliance on one industry--more than a fifth of the valley's population of 155,000 is employed by aerospace firms--has made the valley highly vulnerable to shifts in national policies. The current boom is the climax of four decades of changing fortunes, and the the danger remains that a new president--or a bout of congressional budget-cutting--will plunge the valley into another slump. "The ass-end of the moon" is how daredevil Chuck Yeager evokes the remoteness of Antelope Valley in his just-published memoirs. The isolation, like the wind, has worked to the valley's advantage. During World War II the military was drawn there, in part, because it offered the privacy needed for testing top-secret aircraft. In the emptiness of the desert, pilots could take target practice on a fu1l-scale replica of a Japanese heavy cruiser without fear of being observed by spies. For Yeager and a generation of test pilots who followed, Antelope Valley was center stage. It "didn't mean being stuck in the middle of nowhere," says X-15 pilot William J. (Pete) Knight, now vice mayor of Pal dale. "It meant being in the middle of everything important to the future of this country." But not everyone realized it at the time. "You'd be sitting at the local saloon drinking a beer next to some freckle-faced kid based up at Edwards-never dreaming that 20 years later that kid would be Neil Armstrong walking on the moon," says Barbara Little, now a Lancaster councilwoman. After the war the aerospace frontier spread south from Edwards to Plant 42, an Air Force facility built as a WPA project during the New Deal. Many of the military contractors based in Los Angeles, on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains, set up shop at Plant 42, including Lockheed, Douglas and Northrop. By the early 1960s almost every Air Force plane from the McDonnell F-1O1 Voodoo to Convair's F-106 Delta Dart--had been tested or built at Plant 42. But its contributions to aerospace history did not protect it from hard times. In the national panic that followed the launch of Sputnik, officials in Washington decided that the fastest way to get Americans into space would be to use "Spam in a can" capsules rather than aircraft controlled by pilots. The capsules needed water nearby for emergency landings, so the space program was moved away from Edwards to Cape Canaveral on the Florida coast. Palmdale had its own setbacks. By the mid-'60s, employment had fallen off by two thirds from the peak it reached in the late 1950s. Production and testing of new aircraft slowed as the Pentagon relied on existing planes to fight the war in Vietnam. And the new breed of technocrats in Washington turned to engineers for elaborate paperstudies before any new aircraft projects were launched-a shift away from the "fly before buy" approach that made Antelope Valley's stuff so right in the 1950s. The valley's worst slump came after Jimmy Carter scuttled the B-1 project in 1977. Just when the dream seemed dead, along came Ronald Reagan, whom veteran valley newspaperman Vern Lawson calls "the best thing that ever happened to the Antelope Valley." Reagan revived the B-1 and flooded the entire defense industry with fresh funds. To natives it seems fitting that the years of hope and hard work should finally begin to payoff during the Reagan administration. "We're conservative, hard-working, patriotic folk," says Lou Bozigian, a farmer who became a real-estate dealer as the local housing industry began to grow. "We're Ronald Reagan's kind of people," he explains. Many natives see themselves as preserving the pioneer spirit of the valley's early days. In the 1880s California newspapers put out a call for men with "grit and muscle"' to seed the desert with fruit and alfalfa. The people who heeded that call made up the Antelope Valley's first major group of settlers. Dan Sabovich has grit. In the early '70s he signed on to run the dying Mojave Airport and began renting space at the field to aircraft builders for testing and research. It was a bumpy ride at first. Sometimes he paid the bills by operating an airliner junkyard on outlying runways; he rented space to farmer friends to park their grape-laden trucks until the fruit turned to raisins. But his perseverance paid off. Sabovich eventually became general manager of the revived field; he recently stopped at the local bank that turned down his request for a loan of $120,000 a decade ago to deposit just one day's receipts-$123,000. Many of his tenants, like General Electric and "aerospace hacker" Burt Rutan, are busy developing brand-new products that the military does not have the time, inclination or money to pursue. Rutan alone is generally credited with more breakthroughs in new aircraft structures than any other aerospace designer currently working. One standout: the canard-winged Beech Starship, a radically designed all-composite propeller plane. To sustain this tradition, the valley needs a larger. more permanent pool of young technicians and aerospace engineers-the brains that are as crucial to aerospace as the bravery of test pilots and the brawn of assemblers. The problem is attracting them. The Antelope Valley is still a discouragingly remote and rugged location. Its diversions are strictly rural: community beauty pageants, Fourth of July parades. country fairs. To lure workers, Rutan had to build a gym, racquetball courts and Jacuzzi hot tub-all for just 28 employees. And Lockheed recently decided to keep its creative thinkers on the urban side of the San Gabriels, which offers more creature comforts. In time the valley may be able to supply more of its own brain power. The local two-year college just awarded degrees to its first class of technical aerospace graduates, and a growing number of native-borns are now returning with advanced degrees earned elsewhere. "Now this is where it's happening for creative blue-sky dreamers," says Antelope Valley High School principal Dale Johnson. While many are put off by the valley's hostile climate and lack of big-city amenities, others are drawn to the valley by the promise of cheap housing. Buying out housing developments as quickly as they go up, the newcomers have pushed the annual growth rate ofMojave (population: 2,500) to more than 20 percent. Palmdale has grown from 12,000 people in 1980 to more than 30,000 today. Many of the newcomers are what the locals call "road runners"-commuters who work "down below," the geographically correct pejorative for the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, 65 miles away. The influx has created a threat to the special character of Antelope Valley. For the first time, says Plant 42 commander Lt. Col. Randy Kirchner, "we're getting people who don't derive their livelihood from the aerospace industry." As the natives see it, Antelope Valley is a unique national asset, a crucial source of technological progress in aerospace. They worry about how the road runners will react when their homes echo with the sounds of sonic booms and C-141s shooting practice landings. Old-timers can only hope that the newcomers will come to feel about life in Antelope Valley the way Barbara Little has. When Little is startled by the sound of a sonic boom, she feels reassured.

MICHAEL REESE and PETER McALEVEY in the Antelope Valley