Part two of a series.
While Seal Beach today considers itself “Mayberry by the sea,” back in 1960, the town was even more rustic with a population approaching 7,000 people, compared to about 25,000 today.
Things were about to change.
With 85,000 employees, the North American Aviation Company (eventually acquired by Boeing) was one of the country’s largest employers. It’s annual income of $1.2 billion was second only to General Dynamics which neared $2 billion in annual income.
By today’s standards, $2 billion is a mere blimp on a screen, but more than 50 years ago, it was an incredible sum of money.
With a major office in Los Angeles, the company’s visionary founder James H. Kindelberger was well known, not only for his business acumen but also for knowing how to turn a phrase. “An airplane is like an egg; it has to be sold when its fresh,” Kindelberger was quoted in the Danville, VA, Register in 1962. The company had developed groundbreaking aviation technology for the U.S. government, building and selling more than 40,000 planes of varied models for the military.
Harrison Storms, then 46, quickly earned a reputation for rocketry and jets as NAA delivered the highly successful supersonic X-15 as well as several innovative prototype bombers to the American military. His vision was cirtical.
Research indicates that origins of the Stage two rocket being built in Seal Beach actually began back in 1959 when a committee recommended the design and construction of a high-thrust, liquid hydrogen fueled engine. The contract for this engine was given to Rocketdyne (also eventually acquired by Boeing) and it would be later called the J-2. At the same time the S-II stage design began to take shape. Initially it was to have four J-2 engines and be 74 feet (23 m) in length and 260 inches (6.6 m) in diameter. Eventually, the stage would include five J-2 engines.
In 1961 the Marshall Space Flight Center (now Stennis) began the process to find the contractor to build the stage. According to Wikipedia, out of the 30 aerospace companies invited to a conference where the initial requirements were laid out, only seven submitted proposals a month later. Three of these were eliminated after their proposals had been investigated. However, it was then decided that the initial specifications for the entire rocket were too small and so it was decided to increase the size of the stages used. This raised difficulties for the four remaining companies as NASA had still not yet decided on various aspects of the stage including size, and the upper stages that would be placed on top.
On Sept. 11, 1961, the $3 billion contract was awarded to North American Aviation (who were also awarded the contract for the Apollo Command/Service Module), with the manufacturing plant built by the government at Seal Beach, California.
When NAA won the Apollo contract from NASA, the company’s management decided they needed more engineers. Of their employees, 12,000 of them already owned advanced degrees but they needed more.
Other companies, such as McDonnell Douglas (merged with Boeing in 1997), located in nearby Huntington Beach, also won contracts and subcontracts were looking for engineers as well. The Apollo launched a mini-economic boom long before the first rocket left the pad.
Carl Redlin, who still lives in Seal Beach, quickly became one of the engineers. He was living in Michigan, saw an ad for an engineer, and applied. Two weeks later, he got a call asking him how long it would take him to get here. “Two weeks later, his car was packed, and he headed west.
“I was young and looking for adventure,” he said. Redlin lives in Seal Beach after a very successful engineering career. Redlin was charged with engineering the probes that measured the liquid hydrogen in the Stage 2 tanks. Engineers wrestled with how to keep hydrogen frozen at -423 degrees Fahrenheit. A thermal engineer, his team learned how to safely separate the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen before carefully mixing them with pumps to fuel the massive thrusters on the Stage 2 rockets.
John Pollock, another Seal Beach resident, was also a subcontracted engineer on the program. He worked in the Los Angeles office and said he “helped design the mechanical systems that was inside two of buildings on the Seal Beach Naval Weapons station. Pollock said the three-story assembly building, where the 75-foot Stage II section would be assembled, needed utilities, including steam, compressed air, electrical and instrumentation. Pollock’s team designed many systems that, before Apollo, simply did not exist.
Tom Logsdon, a Kentucky native, who still lives in Seal Beach, first came to Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica from Kentucky then switched over to Rockwell (space division later acquired by Boeing). He was the top math and physics major and had 10 job offers before coming out to California and was one of the top 50 employees to move into the Seal Beach location to build Apollo. Logsdon and his team were assigned to figure out the trajectory to get Apollo to the moon and back and how to use mathematics and incredible calculations to facilitate the payload weight. Using only mathematics and a simple computer that could only perform a fraction of the calculations possible on today’s laptops, they saved NASA and the Apollo program about $3.5 billion in today’s value by creating efficiencies in trajectory and payload. “We used nine branches of advanced math,” says Logsdon.
Redlin not only helped design the thermal protection around the liquid hydrogen, but later became a manager over environmental systems and waste management. Yes, it was a Seal Beach engineer who helped design the systems to keep the astronauts “happy” and “relieved” in space. Redlin was then invited to Cape Kennedy to watch an Apollo liftoff. “It was a moment I will never forget,” says Redlin.
Don Reddington, moved to the program in the mid-60’s, remains in Seal Beach today. At first, he was a crane operator here at the Seal Beach facility but then moved to what is today the Stennis Space Center at the Mississippi-Louisiana border, where the stages were sent for testing before being moved to the Cape.
It is impossible to name all of the local men and women who participated in building the Stage II rocket in Seal Beach. It was a different day and different time. The men remember failures as well as successes. Many times, they say, the rocket parts, tanks and other sections failed as they were forced back to the drawing board.
For instance, Redlin remembers one of the stages exploding while testing the hydrogen in a Sacramento test facility. His roommate was the chief tester. Even during the darkest points before success, however, Redlin said the men would gather in meetings and remember the fact that our President (JFK) had said we had to go to the moon. Failure was never an option. Slowly, and surely, America’s best and brightest made it fly. When fully loaded with propellant, the S-II (stage II) had a mass of about 481 tons. Actually, the hardware itself weighed only approximately 36 tons, yet the remaining weight was the liquid propellant.
At the bottom was the thrust structure supporting five J-2 engines in a quincunx arrangement. Instead of using an intertank (empty container between tanks) the stage used a common bulkhead (similar to that of the S-IV and S-IVB stages) that included both the top of the LOX tank and bottom of the LH2 tank, as described by Redlin.
It consisted of two aluminum sheets separated by a honeycomb structure made of phenolic resin. It insulated a 70 °C (125 °F) temperature differential between the two tanks. The use of a common bulkhead saved 3.6 tons in weight, both by eliminating one bulkhead and by reducing the overall length of the stage. The S-II was constructed vertically to aid welding and keep the large circular sections in the correct shape. But the many teams, which included thousands of workers, finally delivered Stage II on time. This incredible piece of engineering and innovation was ready to be assembled onto Apollo’s booster rocket, built at Michoud in Louisiana, upon which Stage 3 built in Huntington Beach would eventually send men to the moon and back, just as President Kennedy had envisioned.
Once constructed at the Seal Beach Naval Weapons station, the large stages had to be moved down what is now Seal Beach Boulevard. A part of Reddington’s job was to stay ahead of the large convoy, unbolting the streetlights, moving them to the side, and moving them back once the procession had passed, and the stages were eventually loaded onto barges in Anaheim Bay, brought to Stennis (then Marshall) Space Center in Mississippi for testing and eventually to Cape Kennedy for liftoff. Most citizens living today who watched Apollo liftoff only to have astronauts walk on the moon, still beam with pride at the amazing accomplishment. For those who actually were in the trenches and turned steel, gas and desire into a moonshot, the experience has been a lifelong labor of love they can never forget. And for Seal Beach, it’s sometimes good to remember that Mayberry began with a moonshot.
