Space Programs Brought Work to Tulsa
By DR STEWART
More than 40 years ago, the Tulsa division of North American Rockwell Corp. received its first contracts in the Apollo moon program.
North American, the prime Apollo contractor, would later evolve into Rockwell International Corp., which sold its defense and space divisions in 1996 to Boeing Co.
North American received $3.6 billion in contracts to build 19 Apollo command modules and 19 second stages for the Apollo rocket at Downey and Seal Beach, Calif., and Cape Kennedy, Fla.
North American’s Tulsa division, which opened in the old World War II bomber factory at Air Force Plant No. 3 in 1962, won $300 million in contracts.
The Tulsa division built the service module and the adapter for the lunar module, fabricated large parts of the second stage of the Saturn 5 launch rocket, and produced the structure for the instrument unit and ground support equipment.
When NASA started the space shuttle program in the late-1970s and 1980s, Rockwell won contracts to design, develop and build the orbiters and their main engines.
Space work in Tulsa shifted in the 1990s to fabrication of components for the international space station.
After Boeing acquired Rockwell’s space division, Boeing-Tulsa contributed 98,000 pounds of structural hardware to the 1-million- pound space station, the largest and most complex international scientific project ever.
It has involved 16 countries and more than 100,000 people in space agencies and hundreds of contractors and subcontractors around the world.
Boeing-Tulsa finished fabricating the last of its components for the space station in 2001. Those were the Long Spacer and the Short Spacer, two 10,000-pound machined aluminum trusses that maintain the alignment of the station’s solar arrays. Upon completion, they were shipped to Cape Canaveral, Fla., for their long flight.
For the first time in 39 years, the Tulsa division was without work for moon shots or space flights.
(c) 2007 Tulsa World. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.