Odds and ends of U.S. space program find a resting place

LOS ANGELES — Mounds of titanium and steel glinted in the afternoon sun, valves and pipes protruding in all directions like half-formed metal organisms.

In one corner of the warehouse was a twin of the Apollo command-module engine that brought astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong back from the moon nearly 40 years ago. Nearby was the second-stage motor for a Saturn V, the most powerful rocket ever used in the U.S. space program.

Jonathan Goff, a 26-year-old rocket engineer, climbed atop a mound of titanium spheres once used to store highly explosive liquid-oxygen rocket fuel and scanned the area for used rocket parts.

"This is definitely a cool place," he said.

For almost five decades, Norton Sales in North Hollywood has been collecting the nuts, bolts and heat exchangers from the rockets that helped American astronauts shrug off the embrace of gravity. This is where the bits and pieces of America's space program came to die.

Through most of its history, the space junkyard has served as part museum and part fantasy camp for wealthy collectors willing to plunk down thousands of dollars for a piece of an Apollo rocket. Some of its best customers have been car customizers looking for cheap, spaceflight-grade hydraulic valves.

Now, after decades of NASA's dominance of space flight, private rocketeers are launching their own commercial space industry — and they are flocking to Norton Sales.

The Apollo command-module engine goes for $1.5 million. That J-2 engine for the Saturn V? Yours for $500,000. A Thor rocket engine costs a modest $75,000.

The new generation of rocketeers is less interested in big-ticket items than in the smaller pieces of scrap and surplus that they can use to build prototypes, often for a dime on the dollar of what it would cost to buy new parts.

"This is like the holy grail for a rocket enthusiast without much money," said Tim Pickens, president of Orion Propulsion, a rocket-services company in Huntsville, Ala.

Norton has supplied parts to most of the new space rocketeers, including Burt Rutan's Mojave-based Scaled Composites, which built the first privately funded manned craft to reach the edge of space, and Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies in El Segundo, which launched the first privately funded craft to reach low-Earth orbit, though it malfunctioned after half an orbit.

From the outside, Norton's 12,000-square-foot warehouse doesn't look much like a hub of the budding commercial space-flight industry. A misspelled sign on the wall reads: "Space Age Junk and Modern Collectables."

At its height, the firm operated out of six buildings. Two trucks a day made the rounds of the big contractors, such as Douglas Aircraft, Aerojet and Rocketdyne.

Today, few space junkmen are left. The decimation of the aerospace industry in Southern California in the 1980s hit the junkers as hard as it hit the engineering community. Norton shrank to a single building. In recent years, the company has been renting its space flotsam to Hollywood set decorators.

"Every space movie ever made came out of here," Holstrom said.

When the current owner, Carlos Guzman, took over the company several years ago, the financials were uncertain, he said. But President Bush's space initiative, which proposes to return astronauts to the moon by 2020, has helped spur new interest in old rocket parts.

As NASA busies itself with getting to the moon again, it is encouraging the growth of a private space industry that could operate in low-Earth orbit. It already has let contracts with the aim of turning the job of servicing the international space station to private rocket companies. Other startups, such as Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, are banking on the fledgling space tourism business.

Guzman said he sells about $700,000 a year in merchandise and that the company is profitable.

But there are still challenges, especially since the Sept. 11 attacks. Tougher export rules prevent Guzman from selling much stock overseas. It's no longer easy to obtain old rocket parts, either.

"This stuff is tough to get nowadays," he said.

Guzman recalled getting a visit from the FBI after one of Norton's customers put a Peacekeeper missile motor for sale on eBay.

Where, the agents asked, did you get that particular piece of equipment?

"We bought it from the government," came the reply.