I was there yesterday at the very end to see the final Landing of the Final Space Shuttle standing practically on the runway at LAX.
It's a little hard to explain if you aren't from the LA area, but I'll try. When I was just 13 years old I was selected to be part of a gifted youth program that was part of the LA Unified School District. In the summer before I began High School I join hundreds of other kids from around the City and spent a week learning and living at the dormatories of UCLA. Each summer we would return for special classes or seminars.
The memory training session I mentioned last week was from one of those seminars.
During that week we were taken to a theater and shown on a big screen what was, at that time the cutting edge of computer graphics. Just so you know it looked like what would now be considered a fairly basic screensaver. (This was in the late 70's).
We built our own model rockets and launched them at the beach. We visited what was then TRW to see how satellites were built. They took us to the Laserium show at Griffith Observatory. And we did one other thing.
We visited the Rockwell plant in Downey where the Space Shuttle was built. While there we saw a full size mockup of the Shuttle as well as this amazing mural on the wall next to the mockup. It was this mural.
In order to get a sense of scale - look in the upper right corner. See the Shuttle upside down with it's bay doors open there? Yeah, it's that big. The other Spaceship on the left is a Heavy-Lift Vehicle, the kind that NASA is now moving towards.
This is mural shows the in space construction of a Space Colony and a Powersat. I brought this up when Newt Gingrich started talking about turning the Moon into the 51st State. His reasons for wanted to do such a thing was completely wrong, the reason to go back to the moon is to gather raw materials to be used in large scale space construction, and what you would construct would be solar power satellites that could gather the Sun's energy far more efficiently than we can from the ground then transmit the energy for use here.
It's a very practical but ambitious concept to addressing the long term problem of peak oil and finite availability of fossil fuels. When I saw this Jimmy Carter was President and there were Solar Power Collectors on the roof of the Whitehouse.
Reagan removed those collectors.
Instead of vision of using space for the benefit of all, Reagan took us down a dark dead-end tunnel of using space as a weapon.
In the years follow all this I started my first job, at Northrop Grumman - although at the time it was just called Northrop. While I was there we build the B2 Bomber, which was a quantum leap forward in aviation technology. First fully fly-by-wire plane. First plane fully designed and test flown entirely within a computer.
Grumman had built Apollo Lunar Lander. I had an uncle who had worked for McDonnel Douglas who built the Apollo Command Module. My brother-in-law, who is retired now - was former head of Security at Cape Canaveral.
Northrop bought Grumman just a few years before I eventually left the company to become a Software Consultant and Contractor in Sacramento for the State of California. Not long after that Northrop bought TRW and moved their primary operations from Hawthorne, where my mother had worked for nearly a dozen years, to the very same TRW campus that I had seen satellites being built 20 years previously.
Northrop also built the F/A-18 chase planes that were following the Shuttle Endeavour on it's last flight. And the plant that built those planes, Northrop's West Complex facilty, was about a half-mile directly south of where I shot this video. The old TRW complex was just another couples miles further down the same street.
Every week I go grocery shopping at Aviation and Rosecrans, practically in the shadow of that complex.
Aerospace is in my blood. It's in the blood of this city. It's in the blood of this nation.
Yesterday was a moment where I stood in crowd of thousands of total strangers -- and we were All Proud To Be Americans.
We Built That. Bolt by bolt.
Vyan