CONTESTED SPACE
The roar always sounded loudest on hot summer nights, rumbling through the west San Fernando Valley for as long as 90 seconds. Sleeping with the windows open, residents of such Los Angeles neighborhoods as Canoga Park and Chatsworth often awakened to these explosions emanating from the Simi Hills, the modest mountain range along the Valley’s northwest corner.
During the 1950s and ’60s, the noise would shake newcomers to the fast-growing suburbs from their sleep as surely as an earthquake might. For longtime residents, the thunder was only a brief disruption. Just another night up on the Hill, the local nickname for the 2,850-acre Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a hidden Cold War–era installation for aerospace test operations and nuclear power research.
“You would hear those engines rip out, then see the hills around Chatsworth glowing at night,” says Edwin C. Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory, whose family moved to the Valley when he was in junior high school. “It was a significant and considerable orange, fiery glow on the mountains, a phenomenon of the neighborhood.”
Beginning in 1948, NASA conducted more than 17,000 rocket engine firings at four test areas at the site. Engines for every U.S. launch system—starting with the Mercury-Redstone that carried the earliest American astronauts and ending with the space shuttle program—were first ignited on the vertical test stands here, of which six are still standing. The open-framed metal structures resemble offshore oil-drilling rigs; the largest is about 13 stories tall.
It’s no mystery: To reach the moon, you first have to escape the earth. And to do that, the Apollo program conceived the Saturn V, which even in the age
