Space Station Los Angeles: From Peenemünde to Disneyland to Mars
In Mittlewerk the SS worked their prisoners to death or nearly to death, creating engines of mass annihilation. The dead and defiant were fed to the on-site ovens. The Nazis saved money by not feeding these prisoners-simply replacing them with the undead from nearby Buchenwald. The but they proved themselves soldiers. Sabotage on the intricate flying machines was easy and common; reprisals were brutal. The high missile failure rate caused von Braun to visit the Mittelwerk factory so frequently that he had full knowledge of the horrors committed to produce his rocket designs.[1]
More than 1,300 of the slave-built V-2s began to rain down on Britain in 1944, 518 of them hitting London itself. But the novel weapon came too late in the war to be militarily decisive. By any standard 2,700 killed is a slaughter, but by 1944 the volume of civilians killed was not a decisive factor. The V-2’s effect was primarily psychological. Speeding to an altitude of 52 miles, the rocket, controlled by delicate gyroscopes, hurtled to Earth at speeds so great that it was completely unstoppable, even by Britain’s storied aviators. The grim irony is that more Nazi prisoners died building the V-2s than the enemy killed by the finished products. The Nazi weapon had its greatest impact on the Allied engineers. As the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, American forces captured the Peenemünde base and the Mittelwerk factory, rounding-up a very cooperative von Braun, 118 of his V-2 rocket scientists, about 100 V-2s, and thousands of engineering documents. Before the Soviets moved into the territory that had been promised them at Yalta, the world’s most advanced longrange missile program was secreted out of Europe and shipped wholesale to El Paso Texas. The next military frontier was to marry this delivery system to the world’s most advanced explosive device, the atomic bomb.[2]
Although President Truman expressly excluded members of the Nazi party, SS officers, and those directly involved in war crimes, from the technology-capture program called “Operation Overcast,”[3] Wernher von Braun was too great a prize, however, the mastermind of the V-2. His complicity in the genocide and his very high rank in the SS (Hitler’s elite corps) was conveniently forgotten. Von Braun would instead become was an icon of American culture in the postwar years. He served as technical adviser at the White Sands, New Mexico Proving Grounds, rose to become director of development operations for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, starred in the 1951 “Space Travel Symposium” at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, wrote a wildly popular series of articles on space travel for Collier’s magazine in 1952-3, and coauthored a popular book, The Conquest of the Moon (1953). By the end of the 1950s Von Braun was virtually the public face of the American space program, appearing on the cover of Life magazine in 1957 and Time magazine in 1958.[4] From 1960 through 1970 he was the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville Alabama and also of the Saturn rocket program, which would be built in Los Angeles.[5]
In 1954, as workers broke ground for Disneyland, Walt Disney recruited von Braun to write, design, and even appear in Disney’s three-part television series: “Man in Space,” Man and the Moon,” and “Mars and Beyond.” In these shows, his popular series in Collier’s magazine, and three major popular books, von Braun essentially designed American Outer Space culture-first presented as Disneyland’s “Tomorrowland.”[6]
But the United States didn’t really need these Nazis and their slave-built rockets. When von Braun and his fellow Nazis landed at Ft. Bliss, the American rocket scientists were just preparing to test their own, independently-developed WAC-Corporal, the brainchild of a California Institute of Technology team headed by Frank J. Malina. Malina, along with fellow Cal Tech graduate students John Parsons and the prophetically named Apollo Milton Olin Smith, had begun (rather explosive) rocket experiments in Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco Canyon beginning in 1936. Malina wrote a prize-winning 1938 paper on rocket design that the Germans undoubtedly knew well and completed his dissertation on the same subject in 1940. Developing “jet-assisted take-off” (JATO) technology during the early years of the war, Malina became the first director of Cal Tech’s newly-minted Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1944 and began work on the WAC Corporal, which successfully tested at White Sands six months before the German émigrés launched the first of the captured V-2s at the same site.[7]
But Malina’s political orientation was just the opposite of von Braun’s. A leftist, he had participated in either a “discussion group” or a Communist cell in Pasadena before the war.[8] The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused him to begin rethinking the value of his contributions to rocket science, knowing that the primary goal was now to create a missile capable of carrying the heavy nuclear bombs. The FBI had already begun investigating Malina in 1942 and searched his home in 1946. In 1947, hounded by the growing anti-Communist movement and no longer willing to contribute to the military machine, he resigned from the JPL and joined the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris.[9]
VJ Day, Victory in Japan, was celebrated by millions. The “war without mercy” was finally over, but Donald Douglas could not celebrate.[10] "The future is as dark as the inside of a boot,” he cursed.[11] Three Douglas plants closed and employment at Douglas dropped from 160,000 to 27,000 over the course of a few months.[12] The fantastic growth and soaring profits of the aircraft industry had crashlanded in the dismal field of peace. On the day Japan surrendered, North American Aviation had 90,000 employees and 8,000 aircraft on back-order. “Within three months the orders had been cut to 24 planes. By 1946, the work force had been cut to 5,000.”[13] With the Axis powers defeated, the Los Angeles-based aircraft industry faced the possibility of returning to the business of selling commercial airliners and promoting safe, reliable air travel...at production volumes ten times smaller than the firms had grown to accommodate. The dramatic shrinkage in sales in such return to normalcy was disappointing enough, but such a future actually threatened the heart and soul of the industry as well. The aircraft industry was fueled by a culture of cutting-edge, highperformance daring. Flying higher and faster, with more sophisticated armaments, was a thrill that the engineers, executives, pilots, generals, and congressmen all shared. Building bulbuous, safe, and reliable “transport” aircraft would never satisfy such a culture. The best possible news for the aircraft industry would be the arrival of a technological-military threat so great that the skill and determination of the Los Angeles knowledge-industry-military complex would be called upon once again in dramatic competition with a deadly foe.
The two most advanced weapons to emerge in the last months of the war effectively guaranteed that the Southland would need not fear the implications of a peacetime economy. The V-2 rocket and the atom bomb, already deployed on London and Hiroshima, essentially shifted the entire paradigm of warfare once again. Missile technology was obviously the most promising new direction for the aircraft industry.[14]
Long-range missiles are “ballistic” because they rise beyond the atmosphere powered by enormous thrust but fall back to Earth by simple gravity, like a cannonball except that aerodynamic fins and a sophisticated guidance system steers the missile to its target. Ballistic missiles capable of spanning oceans are called Inter-continental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs. The Soviets detonated their first atomic weapon in 1949, and were known to be developing an ICBM (Stalin had managed to snatch the remaining rocket scientists and had reopened Peenemünde). Upon assuming office, President Dwight Eisenhower elevated the missile program to a top priority and by Sept of 1955 he had made the ICBM program the “Department of Defense’s...most urgent development project.”[15]
As Walt Disney and Wernher von Braun captured American minds with their imagineering, the Pentagon’s Air Research and Development Command (ARDC) took a decisive step: they established the nerve center of the U.S. missile program in a single office, the “Western Development Division” in metropolitan Los Angeles. The crucial figure was Eisenhower’s appointee Trevor Gardner, “Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force for Research and Development.” Gardner had earned a BS in Engineering and a Masters in Business Administration from USC in 1936 and rose through industry ranks. In 1942 he became Supervisor of the war-production supporting “Development Engineering Section” at Cal Tech. After the war he was Executive Vice President of Los Angeles’s Goodyear Tire and Rubber, then President of a small Pasadena-based military instrument manufacturer, Hycon. At the Air Force, Gardner was described as “technologically evangelical” -- the driving force behind ICBMs, reconnaissance satellites, and the U-2 spy plane. [16]
Literally hundreds of special advanced technology development projects had flourished in the last years of the war (the greatest being the Manhattan Project), so missile programs were scattered across the continent. The Wright Patterson Air Development Center (WADC) was in Dayton, Ohio; the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) was in Huntsville Alabama; Policy and procurement was centered at the Pentagon; production was chiefly in Southern California, but several prime contractors such as Glenn C. Martin (New Jersey) and Boeing (Seattle) were widely dispersed. Both to center and to isolate the project, “Gardner quipped that Inglewood was as far away from the Air Staff and the Pentagon as he could get.” It was also the closest point to the talent and the facilities necessary to create ICBMs. General Bernard Schriever commandeered a Roman Catholic schoolhouse at 409 E. Manchester Blvd in Inglewood, frosted the windows, and veiled it with the uninformative name “Western Development Division” (WDD). Wearing civilian clothes to blend into the neighborhood, Schriever’s “schoolhouse gang” designed and orchestrated the production of the ICBM program, crowned by the first successful launch of the nuclear-capable Atlas from Vandenberg Air Force Base just a few years later.[17]
Convair already had a $1.4 million missile contract and the other potential contractors were all in the neighborhood, but the decisive factor was the newly-minted Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation, which opened its first office in a former barber shop at the corner of Lincoln and Manchester. The story of Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge between the end of the war and the creation of the WDD wends through the core of the new regional complex of economic and state power. The first element was knowledge. Ramo and Wooldridge were classmates in physics at Cal Tech, both completing their PhDs in 1936. Ramo spent *** years at General Electric, an industry leader until the end of the Second World War. By 1945, Ramo felt that “General Electric was distinguished by Depression-dominated leadership, conservative, pretty much out-of-date.” They didn’t appreciate that “the Abomb was going to change everything.” On assignment to Cal Tech for GE’s part in the V-2 recovery program, Ramo recalled that “the "California" factor zoomed with my wife and me, and it was clear I was going to start a company in California, or I was going to go work for one of the existing companies, or go to one of the universities that had extended offers to me.” Working on guided missiles, Ramo saw the need for a new, more integrated “systems” engineering: “this field of guided missiles, weapons systems dominated by electronics but including flying pieces of equipment as well as equipment on the ground--systems engineering became a very dominant part of it. Those of us who understood this well could see there was a opening.” Ramo took that opening with Hughes Aircraft, building its “Radio Division” from scratch, beginning in 1946.[18]
Howard Hughes was down on his luck in 1946. In July of that year he had crash-landed his company’s experimental high-speed reconnaissance spy plane, the XF-11, into an exclusive neighborhood of Beverly Hills. Trying to reach the Los Angeles Country Club, he fell about 300 feet short, and “the gigantic photographic plane, both its engines whining, tore more than half the roof from a two-story dwelling at 803 N. Linden Drive, occupied by Dr. Jules Zimmerman, a dentist. Simultaneously, the plane’s right wing sliced through the upstairs bedroom of the home next door...narrowly missing the occupants, Jerry De Kamp and his wife Elizabeth, who were in the room at the time.” Hughes suffered massive injuries, but survived.[19] He managed to lose $770,000 on only $1.6 million in sales that year, and by 1947 he was being investigated by the U.S. Senate for war profiteering on the XF-11 and the notorious “Spruce Goose” transport plane.[20]
Starting with just 10 employees, Ramo began by hiring his pal Wooldridge and soon secured an Air Force contract to develop airborne radar-guided “fire control” systems. Brilliant scientist-engineer-administrators, Ramo and Wooldridge rapidly produced the Falcon (GAR-1, GAR-4, etc) air-to-air guided missile, a 6-foot by 6-inch guided rocket spear with a range of 5 miles, which easily shot down two retired, remote-controlled B-17 Flying Fortresses in its first test. The Falcon became standard equipment and “sales to the military rose from $8.6 million in 1949 to $197 million in 1953”[21] To deliver the deadly darts, Hughes built a huge production facility in Tuscon, Arizona and then sold it to the Air Force at cost. Owned by the Air Force but operated by Hughes, the Tuscon plant typified the military-industrial complex. By 1953 Hughes Aircraft Company was no longer struggling, nor were Angelenos. In large part to supply 26,000 Falcon missiles, Hughes now employed 17,000, 4,000 of whom worked in Culver City for Ramo in his state-of-the-art Electronics Division. In his autobiography, The Business of Science, Ramo boasted that his division “came to house the largest concentration of technical college graduates, including Ph.D.’s, in any single industrial facility of that period, except for Bell Telephone Labs...” On “cost-plus” contracts typical during the Second World War buildup, Ramo recalled, “it was essentially impossible to lose money.”[22]
By the late 1950s, the former aircraft industry had been totally transformed, into the “aerospace industry,” dominated by the “Big Five” prime contractors for military missiles, satellites, aircraft, munitions, and electronics systems: Convair (Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation) Douglas, Lockheed, North American, and Northrup Aviation. Through 1953, production for “space” (missiles, satellites, and associated electronics) accounted for less than 1% of Lockheed’s sales. By 1960 these product lines accounted for more than half of its massive volume of $1.3 billion (in 1960 dollars).[23] Together the Big Five had $5 billion in sales in that year, employing more than 200,000 in California alone, and most of those jobs were in Southern California. By then, aircraft had become “almost a sideline.” In fact, Lockheed, Douglas, and Convair actually lost money on their commercial aircraft in 1960. Convair Astronautics was the largest of Convair’s divisions, employing nearly 25,000 workers at its San Diego plant alone, where workers produced the Atlas ICBM, which became operational at Vandenberg Air Force Base in September 1959, and the Atlas-Centaur spacecraft, designed for the first landings on the Moon, slated for 1962-3.[24]
At Douglas, missile and space programs by 1960 accounted for 72% of the company’s outstanding orders. The prime contractor for the Thor intermediate-range nuclear missile—deployed by NATO in the U.K.—Douglas had converted its Santa Monica Division to space and missile programs, employing 18,000 workers in that single facility and 35,000 throughout the metropolitan area.[25]
The massive investment in Metropolitan Los Angeles aerospace contracts necessitated another massive expansion of the building industry. William Pereira and Charles Luckman saw the opportunity to specialize in very large Cold War projects and became trusted architects for top-secret planning. From housing to workspace, the design and construction work oriented the built environment of Los Angeles spaceward.
Simon Ramo’s prescient move to found Hughes’s electronics division in 1946 signaled fundamental transformation of industry, in which “workers” were increasingly collegeeducated engineers. In 1950, one Douglas executive estimated, “we had one engineer to every ten shop workers.” In 1960, he explained, “we’re heading toward a point where it will be one engineer to three shopworkers.”[26] While the Big Five continued to build aircraft, Hughes become more and more specialized in weapons, guidance, and espionage systems that relied on the most advanced electronics. By the early 1960s, Hughes’s El Segundo plant had a $21 million contract to supply the guidance system for the submarine-launched Polaris nuclear missile; its Ground Systems Group in Fullerton had a $19.5 million contract to build “mobile air defense command posts” that included “three-dimensional radar used in surveillance for supersonic targets.” Computers detected and tracked targets, assigning them to “available missile batteries.”[27] In 1961, Hughes Aircraft sealed its leadership in advanced space vehicle development when it won the $50 million contract to build the Surveyor, the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon.[28]
By this time, Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge had long ago left the company. Ramo had discovered early in his tenure at Hughes that the boss’s “comprehension of science and engineering was minimal.” Hughes was not merely “eccentric, uneducated, uninformed, and virtually out of touch with the world,” he was obsessed with personal control, issuing arbitrary orders from his various reclusive residences.[29] In the early 1950s, Hughes had begun to buy-up huge tracts of land surrounding Las Vegas, a prelude to his eventual move into the casino business and the mafia underworld. Ramo and Wooldridge had established a scholarship program to train Ph.D.s that they hoped would eventually work for their Electronics Division. The scholarships were funded from the military contracts, costing Hughes nothing—a practice that by the 1960s deeply ensnarled America’s universities in the military-industrial complex.
Hughes summarily ordered Ramo to cancel the program because he was “opposed to any kind of philanthropy.” Hughes later ordered Ramo to start building facilities in Las Vegas. When Ramo protested that the employees didn’t want to raise their families in what was perceived as a seedy gambling town, Hughes was surprised that Ramo cared about how his employees felt. “It seemed strange to him to ‘build an organization around the idea of democracy’ (his exact words).” (61) Even to discuss these issues with Hughes, Ramo was required to deposit messages at Hughes’s secretive Romaine St. headquarters in Hollywood, which then would be relayed to Hughes at any of his several undisclosed locations. Frustrated, Ramo and Wooldridge left Hughes Aircraft in September 1953 to found the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation.[30]
The later success of the Hughes Aircraft Company would hardly have been possible under the autocratic and arbitrary leadership of the mercurial Howard Hughes. Ramo and Wooldridge’s departure finally convinced Hughes to establish a semiindependent board of directors for Hughes Aircraft in late 1953. In the same stroke, Hughes transferred the complete ownership of Hughes Aircraft to the non-profit Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute, a bizarre arrangement that later involved Democratic Party chieftain Larry O’Brien in a spectacular Congressional lobbying coup to preserve this extraordinary tax shelter. Ramo claims to have explained this financial arrangement to Hughes in the abandoned Santa Monica beach house of William Randolph Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies, where Hughes had summoned him for an emergency meeting the day after Ramo and Wooldridge resigned.[31]
Their spectacular success at Hughes had made Ramo and Wooldridge indispensable at the Pentagon. “For decades,” Ramo recounts, “every airplane with the mission of intercepting enemy bombers entering North American air space was equipped with vitally needed radars, computers, and missiles developed and produced by that one source”: the Hughes Electronics Division in Culver City.[32] They had an inside track for military contracts and their starting again from scratch in an Inglewood barber shop actually entailed no professional risks whatsoever. That barber shop would prove to be the cornerstone of a global corporate empire. By 1954 Ramo-Wooldridge was one leg of the triad that designed and built the Atlas ICBM. The project was so expensive and so complex that the Pentagon’s Western Development Division was the “effective prime contractor.” Convair was the “commercial contractor,” and Ramo-Wooldridge, responsible for “systems engineering and technical direction,” along with “analysis and guidance” of the ICBM program, was neither fish nor fowl. Also described as “technical direction contractor,” Ramo-Wooldridge was “empowered to act on the government’s behalf in directing the work of associate contractors.”[33]
By 1958 Ramo-Wooldridge was exemplary of a new force in the world: a manufacturer without a factory or even blue-collar workers. Its product was scientific engineering, analysis, and complex systems administration. We cannot describe RamoWooldrige as a service provider because the factory production of advanced weapons systems was impossible without their contribution, so they were quite definitely part of the productive process itself and not ancillary to it, as are lawyers and advertisers. In October of that year, Ramo and Wooldridge, seeing that that they could accomplish much more if they had a body to go with this brain, merged with the Cleveland-based Thompson Products Company, a manufacturer of metal products that had begun life in 1901 as the Cleveland Cap Screw Company. This merger of the Industrial Revolution with the Information Revolution resulted in the Thompson Ramo Wooldridge Corporation, or TRW.
Under Ramo’s overall strategic guidance, TRW took the electronic and systems engineering assets of the missile program back into the traditional industrial sectors, transforming them and yielding enormous profits for TRW shareholders at the same time. Ramo felt that “a company that would have as part of its mission in life putting science and technology to work, and to do it on a substantial scale, in the billions of dollars, involving tens of thousands of engineers and scientists-such an organization should think of itself as having to be international in its activities.” Rebuilding Germany and Japan—themselves once leaders in technology and eager to regain that position—became an early TRW specialty. Ramo signed contracts to computerize the Japanese steel industry before the American companies understood the need.[34]
From its initial base in Los Angeles (but now headquartered in Cleveland), TRW became one of the first genuine “multinationals”: “Within a period of a decade,” Ramo recalled: “something like a third of TRW's business was the result not of exports--that's an additional item, not very big with TRW--but was the result of operations in which we had all or a part ownership overseas, and the areas of endeavor involved not just Europe, various parts of Europe and Japan, but activities ranging from Taiwan and South Korea through to Mexico and Brazil and Argentina, of course Canada, [and] initially South Africa.”[35] TRW’s eventual dominance of the personal credit reporting industry, requiring advanced computer systems, perhaps typifies the global social impact of the militaryscientific-government complex that Ramo helped to build from that initial base in Culver City.
By the early 1960s, the billions of dollars in annual sales by the Big Five and its lesser bretheren, like Hughes Aircraft, inscribed a great deal of social power into the landscape. The ambitions of the Pentagon were not modest. According to a study by the Brookings Institution, in 1956-7 the Army alone requested 151,000 nuclear weapons. The total number actually built as of 1998 was 67,000. (The peak number of nuclear warheads—32,193—in the U.S. stockpile was reached in 1966). The estimated costs for ICBM launch pads and silos (more than 1,000), and related facilities, from 1957 to 1964 was nearly $14 billion (in 1996 dollars).[36]
As the United States “won” the Cold War during the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the next sector to decline was the arsenal of that war. “From 1988 to 1993, California lost 140,000 aerospace jobs, at a time when the state was growing so rapidly that it needed to create 200,000 new jobs a year to stay even.” Most of those jobs were in Southern California.[37] Members of the U.S. Congress, eager to put those funds elsewhere (beginning with their own districts), began to point out that the U.S. maintained far more nuclear-tipped missiles than were conceivably necessary.[38] In 1995 Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta to become Lockheed Martin, and moved its headquarters to Bethesda, Maryland. Northrup merged with Grumman in 1994 but remained headquartered in Century City until 2010.
Even though the major aerospace corporate headquarters decamped Los Angeles, thanks to the SeaLaunch Corporation, the Port of Los Angeles is, in 2013, the only seaport in the world that exports to space.
[1] Piszkiewicz (1998): 82, 102, 106, 177-182.
[2] Newfield, (1995); Piszkiewicz, (1998): 227-238.
[3] Operation Overcast was later renamed Operation Paperclip. Simpson (1988).
[4] Life Magazine, 18 November 1957; Time Magazine, 17 February 1958.
[5] “Man Will Conquer Space Soon,” Collier’s magazine, 22 March, 18, 25 October 1953. Contributors included Wernher von Braun, Heinz Haber, Joseph Kaplan, Willy Ley, Oscar Schachter, and Fred L. Whipple. Von Braun’s career chronology is documented in Stuhlinger and Ordway (1994): 358-9.
[6] Piszkiewicz (1998): 43-54, 71-91; Stuhlinger and Ordway (1994): 115-117.
[7] The JPL was a new incarnation of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Cal Tech, known until then as GALCIT. Lord (2005): 60-93.
[8] Lord (2005): 68.
[9] Lord (2005): 93-97.
[10] Dower (1987).
[11] Quoted in Erie (2004): 81.
[12] Morrison (1991): ***
[13] Richard West, “Diversification Key Policy at North American Aviation,” Los Angeles Times, 27 April 1961, p. B1.
[14] Simonson (1964): 305.
[15] Lonnquist (1996): 2.
[16] Lonnquist (1996): 44.
[17] Lonnquist (1996): 113.
[18] “That's the reason why I built the Hughes operation; there was an opening for a company who would engage in this new kind of technology dominated by electronics and systems” Oral History, “Dr. Simon Ramo interviewed by Martin Collins, 27 June 1988, Los Angeles.” National Aeronautics and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.
[19] “Howard Hughes Near Death After Plane Hits Four Houses,” Los Angeles Times, 8 July 1946, p. 1.
[20] “Hughes and Brewster Exchange Charges,” Los Angeles Times, 7 August 1947, p. 1.
[21] Notebook, item 13.
[22] Ramo (1988): 36, 44.
[23] Richard West, “60 Was Lockheed's Worst Year, but Future Is Bright” Los Angeles Times, 26 April 1961, B1.
[24] Richard West, “Convair Officials Optimistic Despite Financial Setbacks,” Los Angeles Times, 24 April 1961, B1.
[25] Paul Beck, “Douglas Aircraft Co. Pinning Hopes on Space-Age Plans,” Los Angeles Times, 25 April 1961, B1.
[26] Paul Beck, “Douglas Aircraft Co. Pinning Hopes on Space-Age Plans,” Los Angeles Times, 25 April 1961, B1.
[27] Yuko Notebook, p. 58
[28] Yuko Notebook, p. 82.
[29] Ramo (1988): 58, 37.
[30] Ramo (1988): 61.
[31] Ramo (1988): 58-77.
[32] Ramo, Business of Science, p. 36.
[33] Lonnquist (1996): 131-38. Quotations at 137-8.
[34] Ramo, Oral History, part 2.
[35] Ramo, Oral History, part 2.
[36] This paragraph is based on Schwartz, ed, (1998).
[37] Cannon (1999: 8-9).
[38] Keith Schneider, “A Fifth of Nuclear Arms Spending Deemed Wasteful or Unneded,” Los Angeles Times 20 May 1991, p. A1.
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- Nuclear ICBM Atlas Missile Launch, Cape Canaveral Florida, 20 February 1958).
- A U.S. Air Force Convair F-106A-105-CO Delta Dart aircraft (s/n 59-0027) from the 119th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, 177th Fighter Interceptor Group, New Jersey Air National Guard, firing a Hughes AIM-4 Falcon missile during the air-to-air weapons meet "
- Walt Disney and Wernher von Braun, 1954
- SeaLaunch: Exporting to Space from the Los Angeles Harbor
- Former Nazi SS Major Wernher von Braun, Time Magazine, 17 February 1958
- Howard Hughes Crash-Landing His Spy Plane in Beverly Hills, 1946
- Convair Astronautics Corporate Headquarters, San Diego, California
- Convair Astronautics Corporate Headquarters, San Diego, California
- German rocketeers after they surrendered to the U.S. troops in Bavaria. Left to right: Major General Walter Dornberger, Commander of the Army Peenemünde Center; Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Axter, a former Berlin patent lawyer and chief of the military staf
- Northrup Aviation Drafting Room (Pereira and Luckman, 1961)
