Orbiter's Beginning

At five o'clock one morning last week, job seekers began lining up outside the offices of North American Rockwell's Space Division in Downey, Calif. Within three hours after the employment office opened, more than 500 job applications had been submitted. What had brought them to the small industrial city was NASA'S announcement that North American, the prime contractor on the Apollo program, had won a contract for $2.6 billion to develop the nation's first space shuttle. This is one of the largest single contracts ever received by any company, and should help relieve the painful recession that has gripped Southern California's aerospace industry since 1969. North American will have to hire about 9,000 new workers within four years, 750 of them by October.

The space-shuttle vehicle, called an orbiter, looks like a puffed-up jet fighter, vaults into space on rockets and lands like a glider. Its first test flight is scheduled for 1976. As designed, it can be reused several times and can ferry up to ten passengers between the earth and orbiting space stations. These stations will be used for astronomical and environmental earth surveys and will be launched in the late '70s. Next year NASA will also award contracts to companies for the shuttle's cigar-shaped rockets and fuel tanks. In addition, North American will need the help of some 10,000 subcontractors to build an orbiter. All together, the contracts will be worth some $5.5 billion.

In the bidding, North American, Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas' space division, all based in Southern California, had help from a well-financed lobbying team headed by Los Angeles Banker Robert Volk and California's Lieut. Governor Ed Reinecke. They made several trips to Washington to persuade top Government officials, including former Attorney General John Mitchell, that a California company should win the contract. Beyond that, North American and its expected subcontracting partners--mainly IBM, Honeywell, American Airlines and General Electric--invested some $40 million to convince the space agency that they could build the best space shuttle. North American prepared a 16-volume, 4,000-page proposal, as well as three color movies. Some employees worked seven days a week, up to 48 hours in a stretch; the company had a rule that they had to quit by 6 p.m. on Sundays. After winning the contract, North American employees held a marathon champagne party.

The ultimate award not only set the stage for a new space venture but also revealed President Nixon's commitment to revitalize the aerospace industry. If Nixon is reelected, he is likely to press hard to revive another project --the supersonic transport, or SST, which was shot down by Congress in March 1971.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.