Bus Trip to the Desert Research Station

 

A BUSLOAD OF PEOPLE JOURNEYED to the CLUI Desert Research Station on January 18, 2025, to see part two of the Center’s exhibit Remote Sensing: Explorations Into the Art of Detection, on remote sensing in the field. The trip also provided an opportunity to look at some of the sites described in the first part of the exhibit, on Southern California aerospace, and for us to point at points of interest on the way. On the day of the trip, participants collected at the CLUI headquarters in Culver City, where they could view the first part of Remote Sensing, and get on the big white tour bus parked at the curb. We departed at 9 AM, when the bus lurched into the stream of traffic along Venice Boulevard, embarking on a day full of surprises for all on board. Our guide, CLUI director Matthew Coolidge, greeted the group, and introduced other members of the CLUI in attendance, including Zoe Detweiler, Hilary Huckins-Weidner, Erik Knutzen, Ben Loescher, and Aurora Tang. Also on the bus were Julia Christensen and Rob Ray, the artist/engineers of some of the projects we were heading out to see at the Desert Research Station, 100 miles northeast, as the crow flies.

A Trip to the Desert Research Station, Part One 
Into the Heart of Aerospace

Making the transition from the San Diego Freeway to the Imperial Highway, the bus climbs into some of the tallest freeway spaghetti in the Southland. When under construction in 1993, the overpass was the shooting location for a notable scene in the movie Speed, in which a bus makes a dramatic and improbable leap over a gap between two incomplete sections of the elevated freeway. 

The freeway thankfully now complete, our safely lofted bus is afforded a view of LAX on one side, and a row of buildings on the other side, lined up along Imperial Highway like books on a library shelf containing the story of Los Angeles aerospace.

As if to serve as an introduction to this alternative version of the city, a sort of LA aeronoir centered in El Segundo, the first building in the row along Imperial Highway is the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times. 

The Los Angeles Times is inexorably linked to the identity and form of Los Angeles, starting as an unabashed civic booster and powerful political pulpit in the late 1800s by Harrison Gray Otis, and carried on through the 20th century by his son-in-law Harry Chandler, and two subsequent generations of Chandlers. The Times was based out of a grand Art Deco headquarters, across the street from Los Angeles City Hall, until the year 2000, when the Chandler era ended, and the paper became part of a media conglomerate. 

In 2018 the Times was purchased by Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a bio-tech billionaire, who moved its headquarters to this location, a building he already owned, on Imperial Highway. Though it no longer has the huge influence on the city that it once did, the paper is still a major voice of Los Angeles, and its relocation here suggests that LA is, after all, a corporate sprawl, with El Segundo as its off-centered center.

The bus descends from the elevated highway westbound, lowering to the ground across from the Flight Path Museum and Learning Center, which is located on the airport flight line. It’s the closest thing to a museum about LAX, and focuses on the golden age of commercial aviation, with displays of flight attendant uniforms and such. The museum is pointed out, but we don’t go there, as we are exploring another story.

Aerospace in Southern California emerged out of early airfields that became massive aircraft factories supercharged by World War II, when the region produced more planes than anywhere else in the country. Three major aircraft companies had plants at Los Angeles Municipal Airport, as LAX was called at the time, making it the largest production center of them all. 

With the Pacific Ocean just a mile and a half to the west, the bus turns left and then left again, heading east on Imperial Avenue. After we cross Pacific Coast Highway, the next half-mile is all Boeing (with the exception of a little Raytheon), culminating in a building more than a thousand feet long, which the company says is the largest satellite factory in the world. 

Known now as Boeing Satellite Systems, the plant specializes in geosynchronous satellites (meaning they rotate with the earth), which are used to communicate primarily with fixed ground antennas. From here came the world’s first geosynchronous satellite, Syncom, built for NASA in 1963, as well as the first commercial satellite, Early Bird, built for COMSAT in 1965. Even into the late 1990s, the plant was the largest supplier of commercial satellites in the world, and one of the largest producers of military satellites as well. Over the past 50 years it has built hundreds of major satellites, nearly all of them large objects, costing as much as hundreds of millions of dollars (not the small CubeSats and earthlink satellites that have proliferated in the past few years).

The plant was built in 1948 as a Nash automobile factory. When Nash went out of business, the plant was purchased by Hughes Aircraft in 1955 to house its growing aerospace operations. Most of the pioneering and superlative projects at the plant were done by Hughes Space and Communications (and its precursor entities), which was acquired by Boeing in 2000. 
 

Hughes was Huge
The scale and importance of the Hughes companies to satellites, radar, missiles, remote sensing, and aerospace overall, is sometimes occluded by the story of Howard Hughes, the legendary personality behind the company. 

Howard Hughes formed Hughes Aircraft in 1934, at Glendale Airport, and moved to a site along the estuary of Ballona Creek near Culver City in 1940. After the war the company expanded into satellites, missiles, and electronics, and for a time was the largest aerospace company in California. 

Hughes grew mostly by strategic acquisitions, including companies like Danbury Optical, which made highly accurate optics and sensors for satellite imaging, and created the Hubble telescope optics, for worse and for better. 

Hughes established what was for a while the largest radar production center in the nation, in Fullerton. It designed airborne radars, ship radars, phased arrays, electronic countermeasure systems, command and control systems, and missile defense systems, often licensing its hardware to be manufactured overseas by NATO partners. 

The Fullerton site started when Hughes Aircraft purchased 313 acres of Orange County orange groves there in 1957, to develop the company’s Ground Systems Group, which ultimately had more than 100 buildings and temporary structures. It was where the Joint Surveillance System was developed, the national military and civilian aviation radar system that is mostly still in use today (and still linked to the ultimate network operations center at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado). Employment at Hughes Fullerton peaked in the mid-1980s, with 15,000 people, working in three million square feet of enclosed space, but shrank at the end of the Cold War. 

Raytheon purchased the Fullerton site, along with most of Hughes Aircraft, in 1997, and sold all but a few acres of Fullerton to developers, who removed the building and testing locations to build a shopping center and hundreds of homes. The site still has five former Hughes buildings, and employs a few hundred people, last we checked. 

Other Hughes sites in Southern California include the Santa Barbara Research Center, making multispectrum sensor arrays, including those used for the first time, in Landsat, and other satellite, radar, and defense components. It is now operated by Raytheon, and still employs more than a thousand people.  

Hughes Missiles in Canoga Park is gone, and now redeveloped. As is a chip plant in Newport Beach. Hughes’ Malibu Research Center, where lasers and LCD technologies were developed, is still a major R&D campus overlooking the Pacific, now operated by Boeing and General Motors. Hughes’ missile plant next to the airport in Tucson, Arizona, is still one of the largest missile plants in the nation, and is also now part of Raytheon. 

Raytheon has taken over as the nation’s primary supplier of ground systems for radar, missiles, and missile defense, with thousands of workers in El Segundo, as we shall soon see, as this bus tour continues.

Back to the Bus
After the Boeing satellite plant on Imperial Boulevard we see a cluster of AT&T buildings. AT&T was the primary communication company in the nation for many decades, and worked closely with Hughes and the federal government in developing its space-based assets, which included systems dedicated to military command and control communications, as well as civilian communications.

Some of these buildings were also the headquarters for DirecTV, which AT&T bought from Hughes in 2015, including its fleet of 12 satellites that provide coverage over North America. Also located in the AT&T towers are offices of Booz Allen Hamilton, a nationwide company that provides computing and intelligence services to the federal government, including the NSA, which has a deep role in satellite-based communications.

The bus turns south off Imperial Highway, between AT&T and the LA Times, onto Douglas Street, towards the heart of El Segundo. Everything on the left for the next mile was the Douglas Aircraft plant, built during and after World War II. It was among the largest aircraft plants in the nation, and still is, though some of it has been redeveloped. 

Dipping into Douglas
For decades, Douglas Aircraft was one of the dominant aircraft companies in Southern California. In World War II the Douglas plant at Santa Monica Airport, where the company originated, produced thousands of airplanes and employed as many as 44,000 workers. 

After the war the company continued the expansion of its wartime plants in El Segundo and Long Beach, and merged with McDonnell Aircraft (based in St. Louis, Missouri) in 1967, becoming McDonnell Douglas. That was absorbed by its former chief competitor, Boeing, in 1997.

Douglas was the progenitor of entities that reflected and enabled the domination of aerospace in the region, including RAND. RAND began as a research division within Douglas Aircraft, exploring future weapons systems and technologies, immediately following World War II. RAND’s first report, a plan for launching the first artificial satellite, was published in 1946, 11 years before Sputnik. Funded by federal air forces, RAND (a contraction of the words "research and development") was instrumental in guiding early defensive and offensive systems for intercontinental warfare in the emerging Cold War, as well as early computer technology and systems theory. It has since evolved into an independent diversified national policy think tank, and is still headquartered in downtown Santa Monica, next to City Hall.

Another offshoot of Douglas was the Systems Development Corporation, which started as part of RAND, in 1955. It was established to develop the software for SAGE (an acronym for Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), an early networked system connecting radar sites with computerized operations centers. Though SAGE was developed chiefly by Lincoln Labs, on Hanscom Air Force Base in suburban Boston, and most of the entities working on it were back east (MITRE, Raytheon, Rome Labs, IBM), the Systems Development Corporation (SDC) work on the project was fundamental to the rise of information technology in Los Angeles, much of it funded by Air Force space projects. The company grew quickly, doing information infrastructure systems and time-sharing computer work, and its headquarters, at 2500 Colorado Boulevard in Santa Monica, employed as many as 3,000 people. 

Douglas closed its Santa Monica plant in the early 1960s, but continued operating at Long Beach Airport. After McDonnell Douglas was bought by Boeing, Long Beach continued to produce military and civilian aircraft until 2015, when the last C-17 transport aircraft left the big hangar at the southern end of the field. The hangar is now used by Relativity Space, a company formed in 2015 to develop commercial rockets. Boeing continues some R&D operations at its Douglas Center, at the northern end of Long Beach Airport, though much of the sprawling complex has been redeveloped into an office park and retail. The remaining big hangar at the north end of the airport, which once churned out McDonnell Douglas DC-3 airliners, is used by Mercedes-Benz as a logistics facility.
 

Southbound on Douglas Street
The north end of the Douglas plant in El Segundo was recently redeveloped into fancy corporate space by Hackman Capital Partners (the same company that redid downtown Culver City, and converted the Culver Studios into Amazon’s primary production center). The cosmetics company L'Oréal has a major lab space there, as does Beyond Meat, which is now headquartered there, a plant for butchering plants to make sausages.

Most of the former Douglas facility is still aerospace, operated for years by Northrop Grumman. Building 902, the larger of two primary buildings, is nearly half a mile long, and covers one million square feet. It was originally built in 1942, and it has produced around 12,000 aircraft over the years. Historically, the plant focused on building airplanes for the Navy (while Douglas Aircraft at Long Beach Airport focused on Air Force programs). A major project in recent years has been producing structural assemblies for F/A-18 Navy fighter jets.

In addition to aircraft component production, the facility has been used for a variety of weapons systems, including some nuclear bomb work in the 1950s. After Douglas Aircraft, it was owned by North American Rockwell, then by Northrop, starting in 1978. Today the building continues to be used for defense projects, including by Northrop’s Aeronautics Systems division, which occupies buildings in El Segundo, Redondo Beach, and Palmdale. Work on things like the Global Hawk UAV is conducted here. 

While the monolithic former Douglas plant dominates the view on the left side of the bus, passengers on the right see a more eclectic view of El Segundo. Spiffed up and redeveloped light industrial buildings have retail, poke shops, gyms, sports apparel, and the headquarters of the LA Lakers basketball franchise, including the team’s main health and training center. South of that is one of several large data centers in El Segundo, followed by an aquatic center. El Segundo is a very sporty, high-tech place.

The southern end of the Douglas plant site is occupied by Los Angeles Air Force Base, a national administrative and technical nucleus of federal satellite and rocket production, and in some ways the national heart of remote sensing. The primary tenant on the base was known for years as the Space and Missile Systems Center. Started in 1954 as the Western Development Division, its original mission was to develop the nation’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system. 

During the Cold War, the Space and Missile Systems Center directed and oversaw all military satellite and space operations, including researching and developing new technologies, guiding their production, launching them into space, and managing their operation, before handing them over to their operating commands. This mission continues today, though in 2021 it was renamed as the Space Systems Command, part of the United States Space Force. More than 20,000 people are engaged in these operations, at a few locations across the country, directed by the headquarters in El Segundo. A major redevelopment of the base in 2006 replaced and upgraded most of the buildings.

To the south, and connected to it by a sky bridge across El Segundo Boulevard, is the Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research and development center (like RAND, MITRE, JPL, Sandia, and Los Alamos National Lab). The Aerospace Corporation develops technologies for the federal government, primarily for the Space and Missile Systems Center, and the National Reconnaissance Office. It also supports programs for NASA, NOAA, and private companies, and specializes in systems engineering for space-based communications, remote sensing, and intelligence satellites. The company has also designed satellite destruction weapons, and studies space debris in its labs. It employs more than 4,000 people, at a few locations around the country.

The Aerospace Corporation originated in El Segundo, from a private company, Ramo-Wooldridge, directed by Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge, two former Hughes Aircraft engineers, tapped by the Air Force, in 1953, to develop a nuclear missile system capable of reaching Russia. Conflicts of interest and concerns about too much control in the hands of one company led to the company’s Space Technology Lab being taken over by a newly created federal nonprofit entity, the Aerospace Corporation, in 1960, which moved into its campus across the street from Los Angeles Air Force Base in 1964.

By that time Ramo-Wooldridge had become TRW, and the Atlas missile was created according to their design, but physically built by other contractors, followed by the Titan, Thor, and Minuteman. Over the following decades these rockets were built by local companies all over Southern California, from San Diego, to the San Fernando Valley, by companies that merged and changed names over time (Convair, North American, Douglas, Rockwell, Lockheed, Boeing). These rockets were the backbone of the ICBM system, and launched astronauts and satellites into space, too. 
 

Rounding Raytheon
The bus makes a right turn at the Aerospace Corporation, and heads west on El Segundo Boulevard, to see a bit more of what El Segundo has to offer. After passing under an elevated Green Line Metro station, with nice public art by Daniel Martinez, featuring a large figurative metal sculpture of a hand holding a paper airplane, the bus goes south on Nash Way, to circumnavigate another unique and superlative aerospace site: Raytheon El Segundo. 

Recently known as Raytheon Intelligence and Space, and Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, it is the company’s largest development site for systems involving space-based sensors, satellites, command and control systems, radar, intelligence, and electronic warfare. Raytheon has more than 6,000 employees in El Segundo, and most of them work in this complex.

With a footprint of over a million square feet, this is one of the largest defense radar and electronic warfare plants in the nation. It was once Bendix, then AlliedSignal, then Hughes Electronics, which Raytheon bought in 1997. 

Raytheon recently changed its name to RTX, after its merger with United Technologies in 2023, and is one of the top three defense contractors in the USA, along with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. 

Unlike the other two, which were principally founded in Southern California and headquartered here for years, Raytheon was founded in Massachusetts, and is associated with the postwar radar work at MIT's Lincoln Labs, located near Raytheon’s former headquarters on Boston’s beltway, Route 128. Like the other two, Raytheon’s headquarters recently moved to the bigger beltways around Washington, D.C.

In El Segundo, as in Southern California, and at least two-thirds of the continental USA, most buildings are rectangles, aligned with the cartographic north/south and east/west township and range grid. As if to just be different, Raytheon is a square, aligned 45 degrees off the grid. The building is mostly set back from the road, surrounded by a buffer of parking lot, some of which has been turned into golf greens, Whole Foods markets, and Dick’s Sporting Goods. Winding around the plant on Hughes Way, the bus passes the new headquarters and training center of the LA Chargers football team. Yet again, El Segundo is one sporty, high-tech place. The LA Kings hockey team’s corporate and training center is in El Segundo, too.

After passing an industrial wastewater treatment plant, Hughes Way meets Pacific Coast Highway at a T intersection. At the stoplight, out the front windows of the bus is Chevron’s El Segundo Refinery, which runs west from here all the way to the beach, a mile and a half away. Though it has several major corporate headquarters within it now, El Segundo (“the second,” in Spanish) was once a single company town: this was the second refinery built by Standard Oil of California (now Chevron). El primero is on San Francisco Bay, in Richmond, California.

The bus heads north on Pacific Coast Highway, then east on El Segundo Boulevard, back towards Douglas Street, completing its loop around Raytheon.

Along the way, we pass some local corporate offices of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major technology, systems integration, and consulting company for the federal government, focusing on nuclear, defense, and intelligence programs. SAIC has had several office and technical buildings in El Segundo over the years—the offices here at 200 Pacific Coast Highway are its most visible, at the moment. 

SAIC was founded in La Jolla in 1969, as an off-shoot of General Atomics, a company now known for its Predator and Reaper drones, which are made in San Diego and the Antelope Valley. SAIC is involved all over the Department of Defense, from weapons effects testing, to communications infrastructure. In 2013 SAIC split into two parts, creating a new company, called Leidos. Leidos recently merged with Lockheed, and is now the largest IT company in the defense sector, and still does much of what SAIC used to do, including things like making TSA airport scanners. SAIC, as a brand, continues its consulting and systems integration work in El Segundo, working with Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, the Aerospace Corporation, and the Space and Missile Systems Center.

A block away from SAIC is the former campus of the Computer Science Corporation (CSC), an important federal information processing company, headquartered in El Segundo for decades. CSC was founded in Los Angeles in 1959, by a co-creator of the Fortran programming language. It was a major supplier of programming technology for systems operated by IBM and Honeywell, as well as directly to the government, initially by developing the flight operations facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. For a time CSC was the largest software company in the USA, doing mega-project systems integration, such as the Department of Defense’s satellite network. In 2015 it spun off its government national security work as a new company, CSRA, which is now part of General Dynamics, the defense contractor based in Reston, Virginia. The remains of CSC merged with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and became DXC Technology, headquartered in Ashburn, Virginia, the epicenter of data centers in the USA.

Across the street from CSC, which is likely El Segundo’s least famous corporate headquarters, is El Segundo’s most famous corporate headquarters: Mattel, freshly back in the pink following its Barbie film success. After passing yet another Digital Realty data center, the bus turns south, back onto Douglas Street, and we pass the bulk of the Aerospace Corporation campus, and another SAIC office. 
 

Space Park
Soon the bus crosses Rosencrans Avenue, transitioning from El Segundo to Manhattan Beach. Past the BevMo and Office Depot, we enter the realm of Space Park, two catty-corner aerospace campuses developed and operated for decades by TRW, a company at the heart of Southern California aerospace. Activities continue here, now managed by Northrop Grumman, currently the nation’s largest defense contractor, which bought TRW in 2002, including its 122,000 employees around the country. Northrop Grumman is also a Southern California company, headquartered in Century City until 2010, when its headquarters moved to Falls Church, Virginia, on Washington, D.C.’s beltway, across the road from BAE Systems and Booz Allen Hamilton.

To our right is Manhattan Beach Studios, a media campus that redeveloped manufacturing buildings that were part of Space Park in earlier TRW days, and turned them into entertainment company sound stages. The studio is the base for director/producer James Cameron’s Lightstorm production company, maker of movies like Titanic, Avatar, True Lies, Strange Days, and, perhaps most notably, Terminator 2, which envisioned a future network of malevolent artificial intelligence satellites called Skynet.

TRW was as much a computer company as it was a space company, since those technologies are directly linked to one another. It made computers for specific aerospace applications, such as pre-GPS satellite-based guidance systems, as well as early industrial computers sold on the open market. It was a pioneer in semiconductor and microprocessing components, such as transistor logic gates and multiplier-accumulator circuits, which were used throughout the electronics industry. It also operated the nation’s primary consumer credit reporting service from 1968 to 1996, indicating the company’s breadth and depth in the field of complex information management systems.

The bus turns left on 33rd Street, and passes through the middle of Space Park’s Manhattan Beach campus, home to some of its most significant microprocessing and computer production facilities. On the left side of the bus is building D1, a foundry for making specialty integrated circuits for microprocessors (also referred to as a fab-plant and a semiconductor plant). On the right is building R6, a research building, and M5, a manufacturing building, built in 1974, the first two buildings on this campus.

Heading south on Aviation Boulevard, the bus transitions from the Manhattan Beach campus to the Redondo Beach campus of Space Park, which is much larger, and more focused on space. The site was established in 1961 as TRW’s Space Technology Center, with four buildings, and within a few years, with rapid growth, it became the primary location for TRW, the company formed by the official merging of Ramo-Wooldridge and Thompson Products, a Cleveland-based automotive engineering company, which had backed Ramo-Wooldridge from its start in 1953.

Space Park is the design and production site for dozens of major satellites and space programs for the federal government, including many for NASA. TRW designed Pioneer 1, NASA’s first satellite, in 1958, and Pioneer 10 and 11, atomic-powered space probes sent out to Jupiter and beyond in the 1970s. Space Park made several space-based observatory satellites, using x-ray and gamma ray telescopes, and the James Webb Space Telescope was assembled here a few years ago, too.

TRW built many advanced and secretive satellite-based observational systems to monitor global nuclear tests and rocket launches, including the Vela series, and the Defense Support Program, which launched 23 surveillance satellites over the years. Other federal satellite programs conducted here include TDRSS relay and communication satellites, Milstar, Intelsat, FLTSATCOM, as well as air and space laser systems.

The classified work at Space Park found some notoriety when a book called The Falcon and the Snowman published the story of a TRW employee selling information to the Soviets. The book was made into a Hollywood film in 1985, which was partially filmed at Space Park. Scenes from the 1960s TV show Star Trek were also filmed here, which was especially fitting since that show is often cited as a major motivation for people to seek future careers in aerospace, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, and others who “boldly go.” 

The bus turns left onto Space Park Drive. The campus is mostly contained within a square half-mile, with Space Park Drive running through the middle. On the left are the first four buildings constructed at Space Park, when it was still called the Space Technology Laboratory: two research buildings, a manufacturing building, and a five-story engineering building, all in a uniform Space Age modernist style. 

Visible beyond is the 12-story corporate tower, E2, built in 1968, now emblazoned with the Northrop Grumman masthead, looming above the parking lots and the rest of the alpha-numerically named functional research, manufacturing, and test buildings on-site. Behind their low-slung, windowless walls are thermal vacuum chambers, electromagnetic test chambers, clean-rooms, assembly halls, and facilities performing micro to macro mil spec manufacturing with the highest degree of precision. 

The bus passes TF2, one of a few high-bay engineering buildings used for spacecraft assembly. Next to that is the largest structure at Space Park, the conjoined buildings M2 and M1, 1,000 feet long and topped with a 50-foot radome containing a nine-meter steerable dish antenna. 

On the right, the bus passes building M8, where the final testing and assembly of the James Webb space telescope was conducted. In 2021, after decades of work spanning the globe, the completed nine-billion-dollar spacecraft was rolled out of these tall doors on a wide-load trailer, and made a slow motion nocturnal procession to Seal Beach, where it was loaded on a ship bound for French Guyana, then launched into space, to see what it could see.

The bus leaves the campus and heads south on Redondo Beach Avenue, where several more Space Park buildings are mixed in with other warehouses and engineering buildings down side streets. But we are done here, so we head west on Manhattan Beach Boulevard, and then on to the 405.

SpaceX is Over There
Traveling north on the San Diego Freeway towards the Antelope Valley Freeway, the bus soon meets Imperial Highway, once again. Two miles east down that highway is Hawthorne Airport, once the primary production site for Northrop Aircraft. It was where Jack Northrop’s unprecedented and massive flying wing aircraft were developed, along with the Snark cruise missile, and the F-5 fighter jet. Northrop merged with Grumman in 1994, becoming Northrop Grumman, which is now the largest aerospace company in the Los Angeles region, and, likely, the world. 

But little of the old airport is operated by Northrop now. It has become a kind of corporate man cave for the “richest man in the world”—not Howard Hughes this time around, but Elon Musk. The east end of the old Northrop aircraft plant at Hawthorne Airport is the headquarters for SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company, which has revolutionized the space industry over the past decade. Until the company completes its move to Texas, where most of its operations are now based, this site remains active as a R&D center, mission control, and headquarters, and has additional facilities for Tesla, the Boring Company, and other Musk companies.

This is still, too, the main site for Falcon 9 rockets to be made and refurbished. The rockets are 12 feet wide so they can go on trucks overland to Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg to be launched. The launch site in Brownsville, Texas, is just for the bigger rocket, the Starship, which is still in testing mode. Almost 500 Falcon rockets have been launched since the first one in 2010. 

At the southeast corner of the main SpaceX building (whose roof is marked with a big “X,” made by an arrangement of solar panels, visible to planes flying in to LAX, and on Google Earth) is the first Falcon 9, on display outside, and the only publicly accessible part of SpaceX. Inside, workers moving between the offices and the factory floor pass through a hallway gallery featuring, behind glass, the costume worn by the actor Robert Downey Jr. in the film Iron Man, and on the other side, server racks of a stylized data center, labeled with the Skynet logo from Terminator 2.

The main Northrop aircraft plant building on the west side of the complex became the headquarters for Starlink, the space-based internet company owned by Elon Musk, which is currently deploying thousands of small satellites into low earth orbit to provide internet connectivity all over the world, far outpacing the coverage of Hughesnet, DirecTV, and other space-based commercial and consumer connectivity providers. 

Starlink has launched more than 7,000 satellites—which is most of the satellites that have ever existed. Plans include launching as many as 20,000 or more, or less, depending on what works. It’s a quickly changing technology, and one trend is to make satellites bigger and more powerful, as concerns about space debris in low earth orbit continue to mount.

In the meantime, dozens of folded and flat-packed Starlink satellites can be stacked like cafeteria trays inside a Falcon 9 rocket, and put into orbit with each launch—launches that can take place at the rate of a couple times a week.

There will be more to learn about Starlink when we get to the Desert Research Station, which we are heading towards now, at freeway speeds, up the 405, having completed our orbit of El Segundo.

 

A Trip to the Desert Research Station, Part Two 
The Four Watersheds of Los Angeles

The architectural writer Reyner Banham wrote about the “four ecologies” of Los Angeles: the beach, freeways, flatlands, and foothills. Another way to consider the modern city is across four primary economic periods: agriculture, oil, aerospace, and entertainment. On the rest of our journey we’ll further quarter the city’s ecologies along the four drainage basins we are passing through, which extend like steps from the shores of the Pacific Ocean, to the dry lake beds in the landlocked basin of the desert, where aerospace literally took off.

We continue our journey northward on the 405, looking at an ocean-like expanse of housing and retail across the landscape of Los Angeles, from our mobile perch on the elevated freeway. Looking out the window, it’s as much a roofscape as it is a landscape; an intricate system to move water over shingles and sheets; to gutters and downspouts; to streets and storm drains. Even in a relatively dry place like Los Angeles, architecture is about shedding water, and landscapes are watersheds.
 

Ballona Basin
At Manchester Boulevard we imperceptibly enter the Ballona Basin, a watershed that drains most of the west side of Los Angeles, as well as Hollywood, Koreatown, Beverly Hills, and much of South LA, too, including Florence and Normandie. The storm drains of this basin flow to the ocean through networks of underground and daylighted concrete canals, culminating into one big one, Ballona Creek, which flows past Howard Hughes’ former runway in Playa Vista, now covered in more housing, and out to sea at Marina Del Rey. Crossing the creek in the bus on the highway happens in just an instant, past Fox Hills Mall.

But there is another watershed inside this watershed: the water that is engineered to come in and go out of the buildings in a constructed way. It arrives through state-wide plumbing, from land hundreds of miles away, to lubricate our meals, clean our surfaces, hydrate our bodies, and flush away our wastes. Each building is a tributary to this stream, which collects into bigger and bigger pipes on its way to the treatment plant, then out to the ocean. The outfall for this area, and much of Los Angeles, is the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant, on the beach in El Segundo. 

As we cross the Santa Monica Freeway, we pass over the Sawtelle Oil Field, one of a few dozen oil fields in Southern California that are still being pumped. Next to the freeway is a fenced lot where 18 oil wells, each of which snakes around underground in its own way before ending somewhere in the oily earth, more than a mile below, meet the surface. More drainage. 

We begin our ascent into the Sepulveda Pass, and we pass the Getty Center, which was built from the fortune of John Paul Getty, a global LA oil man who held the title of the “richest man in the world” for most of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, longer than anyone else in the 20th and 21st centuries. And since the Getty Foundation’s PST ART program supported the CLUI Remote Sensing exhibit, which this bus trip is part of, we salute John Paul Getty as we pass by his shrine. 

(It should also be noted, in mentioning the richest men in the world, that Elon Musk’s current net worth, estimated to be above $350 billion, is more than the net worth of most of the other richest men in the world over the past century, including Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Sam Walton, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and John Paul Getty, adjusted for inflation, and combined. Just sayin’.)

The Valley
After cresting the Sepulveda Pass, the bus descends into the San Fernando Valley, and the watershed of the Los Angeles River. While the headwaters of the river are in the hills of the western San Fernando Valley, the source of much of its continuous dribble is the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, which processes the wastewater of the San Fernando Valley. Thus, the real headwaters of the river, it could be said, is the Sierra snowpack via the LA Aqueduct, and the dishwashers and kidneys of the citizens of the San Fernando Valley. 

The Tillman plant’s outfall flow joins channelized stormwater creeks, including the Los Angeles River, which converge in the Sepulveda Basin, a flood control area bounded by the Sepulveda Dam, and continues in a concrete channel along the north base of the Hollywood Hills, rounding the edge at Griffith Park, flowing through downtown LA, and out to sea in Long Beach.

We point this out as the bus drives over the LA River, and passes the Sepulveda Dam, which is also a major movie location landmark, used for its resemblance to some kind of futuristic brutalist megastructure, and appearing in films like the influential, geeky Buckaroo Banzai, and John Carpenter’s dystopic Escape From New York.

Soon, on the right, is L3Harris’ Van Nuys site, one of several aerospace plants still operating in the San Fernando Valley. This facility, next to the 405 freeway, makes radar systems for aviation and defense, including electronic warfare, air traffic control, and tactical radar systems primarily for the Navy. Operated for years by ITT, the plant is now owned and operated by L3Harris, the nation’s sixth largest defense contractor, which specializes in communication, surveillance, reconnaissance, and intelligence technologies.  
 

L3Harris in the Valley
L3 was formed from Loral Aerospace, in the aftermath of the 1995 Lockheed/Martin Marietta merger, became L3Harris in 2019, and is still growing quickly. A couple of years ago, L3Harris bought Aerojet Rocketdyne, a major rocket engine company with a number of sites in the western San Fernando Valley, including the still active rocket engine plant on De Soto Avenue in Canoga Park. The company’s rocket engines are used by NASA, and have powered every Air Force ICBM rocket ever fielded, including today’s Minuteman III. 

The site in Canoga Park dates back to the late 1950s, when Atomics International, a division of North American Aviation, established its headquarters there. The company was developing nuclear power production, primarily for applications in space. Another Aerojet Rocketdyne site is a few miles south on Canoga Avenue, and was the location of a much larger rocket plant. It was demolished a decade ago, but is still an empty lot, awaiting further remediation and commercial development. 

The biggest Aerojet Rocketdyne site is the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a 2,800-acre complex in the Simi Hills, where rocket motors were tested and nuclear reactors were developed. It was established by North American Aviation in 1949, and early V-2 rockets were tested here (by the German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun), as well as Atlas rockets, used for ICBMs and the Apollo space program. Operations ceased in 2006, and the process of remediation took over, led by its current owner, Boeing.

Associated with the field lab was an 80-acre office and engineering park at the base of the hills, next to the former Chatsworth Reservoir. The office park was built in 1960 by TRW, as its principal campus, before Space Park took over that role, later on. Other associated companies, including Atomics International, Hughes, and Raytheon, also operated at this location. The office park is now occupied by a variety of unrelated corporations, including an adult toy company. 

Lockheed was headquartered in the western San Fernando Valley, in a 20-acre campus it built in Calabasas, after leaving Burbank in the 1980s. When it merged with its rival, Martin Marietta, in 1995, it become the largest defense contractor in the nation, and the company’s headquarters moved to the Washington Beltway. 

Bound to the North
Despite the temptations to the west, the tour bus manages to maintain its northbound journey on the 405, through the middle of the San Fernando Valley. We pass the landmark Budweiser plant, which opened in 1954, and is one of only 12 Anheuser-Busch breweries in the USA (“only,” because the company is, still, the king of beers, with around a quarter of beer market share). The fact that the company’s historic headquarters and flagship brewery in St. Louis, Missouri, is next door to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a federal agency that provides location-based and remotely sensed information to the federal government’s military and intelligence organizations, is likely just a coincidence. 

The bus merges with the 5 freeway, at an infrastructural nidus at the north end of the Valley. Located here, visible out the left side of the bus, is the terminal reservoir of the LA aqueducts, where water from the Eastern Sierra is cleaned up and enters the city’s pipes. North of the reservoir is the largest water treatment plant west of the Mississippi, operated by the Metropolitan Water District, to clean up Colorado River water, before it goes to the San Fernando Valley and west side of Los Angeles. On the right we pass the Sylmar Converter Station, where electricity from dams on the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest comes to Los Angeles, and is converted from DC to AC current. 

Next to that is an open lot where a historic aerospace building was recently torn down. This was where the Bendix company designed, tested, and manufactured avionics and other electronic hardware for military and aerospace applications. There was even an indoor pool for testing sonar. 

Bendix, based in the Midwest, had a big presence in early aerospace in California, and operated nuclear weapons plants for the Atomic Energy Commission. Bendix built and installed the telemetry systems in all ground stations for the first crewed space flights, and made dosimeters, mass spectographers, radar, and many other types of electronics. In the decades between 1970 and 1990, Bendix went through a series of mergers and changes with partners and buyers, including AlliedSignal, Honeywell, and Raytheon.

As the bus climbs into the Newhall Pass, we pass the Cascades on the right, a waterfall where the two LA aqueducts can be seen making their final descent into the city. This is where 40,000 people gathered in 1913, and watched the water commissioner, William Mulholland, turn on the taps that brought water to the city, ending his speech with the famously terse utterance “Here it is. Take it.” 

Across from the Cascades, on the left, an endless stream of garbage trucks can be seen crawling up the slope like gorged ants, to drop their load in the Sunshine Canyon Landfill, often ranked as the biggest and busiest landfill in Los Angeles. It’s likely no such speech occurred when it was commissioned, nearly 70 years ago, although a county sanitation engineer could have said, “There it is. Leave it.” 
 

Newhall Pass is the northern infrastructural gateway of Los Angeles for transportation, too, where Interstate 5, Highway 14, and their associated truck lanes converge in a tangle of elevated ramps, which is one of the most complex intersections in the entire city. Below them the Sierra Highway meets the Old Road, and an active railway comes out of a tunnel in the middle.

The interchange was under construction when the San Fernando earthquake struck on February 9, 1971, causing extensive damage. The interchange failed again during the Northridge earthquake of January 17, 1994, and is now named after Clarence Wayne Dean, a motorcycle cop who was unluckily riding on the upper decks during the quake, and drove off a collapsed end.

Nearby, attesting to the importance of this pass historically, is Beale’s Cut, where a 93-foot-deep by 20-foot-wide passage through the mountains was cut to help wagons through. Started in 1859, the cut became known as Beale’s Cut, as General Edward Beale, the Surveyor General of California at the time, charged a toll for passage through it. He also amassed a personal empire of land further north, around the Grapevine (as the narrow pass that is the artery connecting Southern and Central California is called). Beale’s empire, the Tejon Ranch, was owned for several decades by the LA Times’ Chandler family, and remains the largest contiguous piece of private land in California.

Water Seeks its Own
Transitioning from the 5 to the 14, known as the Antelope Valley Freeway, we soon enter the third watershed of the trip, that of the Santa Clara River. The Santa Clara River drains the north side of the San Gabriel Mountains, and extends from the edge of Antelope Valley, west to the ocean at Ventura, draining the mountains north of Fillmore and Santa Clarita.

It is a region prone to fires and floods, the most famous of which came in 1928, when the St. Francis Dam failed, killing more than 400 people, as it washed through the normally dry riverbed, leaving a path of destruction all the way to the beach at Ventura. It is often cited as the worst American civil engineering disaster of the 20th century.  As part of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the dam had been inspected and deemed safe hours earlier by water master William Mulholland, who retired remorsefully soon after the failure, saying he envied the dead. 

This epic incident anchored the Department of Water and Power in the dark side of Los Angeles, a city built around this unprecedented, hubristic, 200-mile long-aqueduct, draining the water from the middle of the state, by gravity. The spanning of drainage basins to this extent, it seemed, was an infrastructural overreach, casting a shadow of noir across the city’s sun-soaked grid, like a municipal original sin.

The spanning of watersheds, of course, continued through the 20th century, and occurred all over the nation, even crossing over the Continental Divide. But nowhere is it done to the extent as it is here, in California, the most hydrologically rejiggered state in the union, where constructed concrete rivers connect the deserts in the south with the rainforests of the north, and where rain that falls in Wyoming can land on lawns in Lawndale.  

The LA Aqueduct is visible off the left side of the bus at Placerita Creek, where the 12-foot-wide pipeline drops downslope though an oilfield, plunging in and out of the contours of the ground like a sandworm. 

Off the right side of the bus is a road up Placerita Canyon, named after the placer gold that was discovered here in 1842, six years before the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in Northern California. If this Southern Californian gold discovery had panned out, maybe the Gold Rush would have happened here, and not up north, and perhaps Los Angeles would have become the epicenter of growth on America’s western coast, not San Francisco.

But after four years of mining extracted an estimated thousand pounds of gold here (with a value today of almost $50 million), production dropped off, and the Mexican-American War began, ending with California becoming a US territory in 1848—the year gold was discovered up north. 

What did happen in Placerita Canyon afterwards is that a California State Park was developed around the discovery myth of the Oak of the Golden Dream. Francisco Lopez, a local ranch hand, was said to have taken a siesta here, dreaming of gold, and after waking up dug up some wild onions for his birthday dinner, and found gold in the dirt. The oak tree became a state historic landmark in 1935. At Placerita Canyon today is the Golden Oak Ranch, a 90-acre movie ranch owned by Walt Disney Studios since 1959, and significantly developed in recent years, to become one of the most extensive off-lot backlots in/not-in Hollywood.  

Golden Oak is among the dozen or so movie ranches in the region that extends along Highway 14 from Santa Clarita through Aqua Dulce. The reason so much location filming is done here is because it is relatively close to Hollywood, but also provides space and a variety of landscape features, especially important in the days where Westerns were popular and required town sets, undeveloped arid land, and horses. As location needs diversified, productions grew in scale, and urban studio backlots shrank due to development pressure. Western movie ranches adapted by developing different types of town sets, and collecting props like vintage cars and military equipment. They could also host bigger pyrotechnic events than urban studios, a growing demand in the industry.

Another reason this area has so many movie ranches is because most of it is inside the Zone—a circle with a 30-mile radius from Los Angeles (measured from a former industry office, now a pharmacy, on La Cienega Boulevard, across from the Beverly Center). Inside the circle is considered local for movie workers to commute to. Beyond the Zone, workers need to be paid per diems and for other expenses that add significantly to the cost of production. 

After passing the massive dirt parking lot at Golden Oak Ranch, with room for movie trailers and craft services, the bus continues up Highway 14, traveling next to the dry washy swath of the Santa Clara River's riverbed, which is increasingly encroached upon by the dense and meandering housing tracts of Canyon Country. 

Further along, where a gas line crosses the river in a large suspension bridge, riverside parking lots are full of hundreds or thousands of cars, all visibly damaged, in one way or another, like the fallout of a massive smash-up derby. It is actually a salvaged car auction lot, operated by Ritchie Bros. Large equipment auction sites are something you often see on highways at the outer fringes of cities, and many of them are owned and operated by Ritchie Bros. The IAAI division of the company focuses on salvaged vehicles, and has 200 locations in the USA and UK. Salvaged and damaged vehicle auctions seem to be a growth industry, as a result of an increase in frequency and severity of natural disasters, and the consolidation of the junkyard and car parts industry.

Across the river is a former Nike missile battery known as LA-98, one of 16 in the hills (and dales) around Los Angeles that operated over the 1950s to the 1970s, to protect the city, and its critical aviation industry, from attack by enemy bombers. Generations of Nike missiles once lay in wait at these locations, generally with cradles that lifted them out of underground vaults, to firing positions for a launch that never came. Some of them even had nuclear warheads. LA-98 was functional from 1955 to 1968, and is now a refueling station for wildfire helicopters—or was, until it was burned in a recent wildfire. 
 

Further up the highway, diagonal rock outcrops visible out the left side of the bus get more and more pronounced, until finally we reach the apogee of Vasquez Rocks. This distinctive and dramatic formation has been used in numerous film and TV productions, including as the alien planet in Star Trek, and nearly every episode of the 1970s Western TV series Big Valley. Vasquez Rocks has appeared in so many productions, including ads, that you’d think the familiarity would be a liability, yet still, during weekdays, it’s often circled by production trailers. It doesn’t hurt that as a Los Angeles County Park, location fees are less than at private locations. 

North of Vasquez Rocks is Agua Dulce, and more movie ranches. One of them, Firestone Ranch, is where Jordan Peele filmed much of his 2022 movie Nope, a movie that captured this landscape in uncanny ways. It was a movie about movie ranches, the horse ranches that serve them, and their roots in the overripe myth of Westerns; Roy Rogers nostalgia turning into horsey ranchy real estate. It was also a movie about remote sensing, too: its characters do things like set up rows of inflatable wiggly dancing tube man signs, to detect invisible aliens who menace the region in ambiguous, unfathomable ways, like some environmental bad conscience.

Watershed 4: The End of Drainage
Past the town of Acton we crest the Transverse Ranges and rapidly descend into the San Andreas Fault. On the way down, the bus stops on the rim of the rift zone, at the Lamont Odett Vista Point, for a good view of what lies ahead. 

Just below us, in the foreground is the East Branch of the California Aqueduct, which brings Northern California water, pumped over the Tehachapi Mountains at Tejon Ranch, east through the desert along the base of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains, then into two storage reservoirs: Silverwood Lake, in the San Bernardino Mountains, which is the headwaters of the Mojave River; and Lake Perris, in the Inland Empire.  

Along the way, the California Aqueduct drops some water into Lake Palmdale, visible below the overlook, which supplies Palmdale, visible beyond it. The Antelope Valley cities of Palmdale and Lancaster are in the Amargosa Creek drainage, a creek that is often hard to find in this recontoured desert landscape. 

The watershed of the Antelope Valley, which we are now in, covers 3,400 square miles, and although it includes Amargosa Creek and many other dry creeks, it has no outlet to the ocean. It is endorheic, draining into a dry lake at the bottom of the basin, a dry lake that is visible in the distance from the overlook: Rogers Dry Lake. A dry lake that is the reason we are here, and the reason why Palmdale is here, for that matter.

In the near distance, below the white band of Rogers Dry Lake, is a row of large buildings. This is Plant 42, the most advanced aircraft production center in the nation, and our next stop on the trip. 
 

Plant 42
The bus leaves the overlook, drives through the San Andreas Fault, and exits Highway 14 on Avenue P, eastbound. We are at the southern edge of Plant 42 within a mile. Plant 42 is an Air Force asset, operated as part of Edwards Air Force Base. It consists of several test and production complexes, leased to contractors, or owned by contractors outright. In the middle of Plant 42 is a runway that is also the airport for the City of Palmdale, which has no scheduled flights or services. The terminal is shuttered.

The first set of buildings we see is at Site 10, and belongs to Lockheed Martin. Lockheed developed the master plan of Plant 42 for the Air Force in 1951, and was the first major tenant at Palmdale after the war. From 1968 to 1984, Lockheed built L-1011 commercial airliners here, as well as military aircraft, and provided space for its secretive Skunk Works division before that. Early Skunk Works programs include the U-2 spy plane and the SR-71 Blackbird, in the 1950s and 1960s, and the F-117 stealth fighter/bomber in the 1970s and 1980s. Lockheed Martin’s operations at Palmdale have grown since then, and now include eight principal structures, and covers nearly a square mile of land. Unlike most of the other contractor sites at Plant 42, Lockheed owns most of their property. 

Northeast of Lockheed is Site 1, operated by Boeing, which uses it for UAV programs and other advanced and classified aviation projects. The site was developed by North American Aviation in 1952, to build fighter jets. Starting in the 1970s, Rockwell developed B-1 bombers here, a plane which still serves as the nation’s only supersonic heavy bomber. Rockwell also built all five of the Space Shuttles, using assembly buildings at Site 1 and 9. Boeing acquired Rockwell in 1996, and took over the site as its High Desert Assembly Integration and Test facility. Boeing developed the X-37 here, a smaller reusable robotic space shuttle that the Air Force has used for secretive space missions.

Next to Site 1 is Site 2, where the Air Force maintains Lockheed U-2 spy planes. Though the U-2 was developed in the 1950s, it is still currently active in the Air Force’s fleet, as a manned surveillance aircraft, as it has unique capabilities, including being able to fly at 70,000 feet.

Site 2 was first developed by Northrop in the 1950s, for the F-89 Scorpion interceptor jet. In 1963 Site 2 was used by North American Aviation to build the massive XB-70 Valkyrie supersonic bomber. Only two were ever made, one of which crashed east of Barstow. Lockheed took over Site 2 after that, to store A-12 spy planes moved from Area 51, and to develop the SR-71 Blackbird.

Northrop Grumman operates a significant complex next to Site 2, at Site 3 and 4, which includes the largest single structure on base, an assembly hall with a footprint covering close to a million square feet. This was built for the B-2 stealth bomber, which was assembled here, from parts produced all over the country, but principally from Northrop Grumman’s plant in Pico Rivera (which has been torn down and turned into a shopping center). 

Currently in production is the B-21, the latest generation of the long-range stealth bomber, unveiled here in 2022, and undergoing flight testing at Edwards Air Force Base. The buildings on the west side of the Northrop Grumman site are focused more on UAV programs. Facilities there were first used by Convair for assembling fighter jets in the mid 1950s, and have been used since the 1990s as a development and assembly site for Teledyne-Ryan’s Global Hawk UAV. Teledyne was acquired by Northrop Grumman in 1999, and the company’s UAV assembly and testing programs continue here.

Sites 5 and 6 include the administrative and airport functions of Plant 42, and are south of the runway, near the middle of the airport. Located here is a terminal building that for years was used to fly contractors, mostly working for Lockheed, to and from the secret aerospace base known as Area 51, at Groom Lake, Nevada.

Site 7, also near the middle of Plant 42, has a number of large sheds and work buildings that have been recently used for especially sensitive and advanced aviation test programs. This is where Lockheed Skunk Works tested the RQ-170 Sentinel UAV, one of the most exotic and secretive UAVs known to be deployed across the globe. It resembles a flying wing, like the B-2 stealth bomber, and was developed for the CIA as a pilotless stealth surveillance aircraft with a wide range of electronic surveillance and countermeasures systems. It has been flying since at least 2005, and gained some notoriety when Iran captured one, mostly intact, in 2011. Northrop Grumman also has facilities at Site 7, recently used for the testing program for the MQ-4C Triton UAV, dozens of which are now in use by the Navy as surveillance aircraft.

Site 9, located at the southeast corner of the airfield, is now a civilian facility. It was mostly developed by Rockwell for the production of the B-1B bomber and the Space Shuttle. All 100 of the B-1Bs were assembled here. The site has two large assembly sheds and one large warehouse-type structure. The larger shed, called Building 703, became part of NASA’s Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center, the agency’s experimental flight center, located at Edwards Air Force Base. For years NASA based its Airborne Science Laboratory planes here, including a DC-8 airliner that is used for a variety of research programs. 

NASA moved out in 2024, and the building is being repurposed, again. Over the years it has been used for film productions, including the 1998 thriller Hard Rain, a movie set in a flooded Midwestern town. The set was built in the hangar by lining it with plastic sheeting and flooding it with a few feet of water. The other hangar, Building 704, is now used by Kinkisharyo, a Japanese train company that builds light rail cars for Los Angeles, as it has done for many other urban regions, including Boston, New Jersey, and all over Japan. Its American headquarters is in—where else—El Segundo.

After passing along the southern flank of Plant 42, the bus turns left, towards the main administrative entrance, which is gated and closed to the public. Outside the gate is the FAA’s Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center, which monitors and controls air traffic throughout Southern California, and lines up the aircraft headed to and from airports in the Los Angeles region, consolidating information from radar and other tracking sources. 
 

Across from that is Blackbird Airpark, operated by the Flight Test Historical Foundation, where several aircraft are on display. This is the only part of the base that we are allowed to enter, and the bus turns into it and parks. The group disembarks and clusters around a docent, for an introduction to Plant 42, and to see some of its products on display.

The aircraft on display here are remote sensors—flying cameras, that flew as high as aircraft could. They include a U-2, one of 80 that were built in order to surveil Soviet activities, intended to be capable of flying above the range of radar and of surface-to-air missiles. After just a few years it became clear that this was not the case, when, in 1960 a U-2 being flown 1,000 miles inside Soviet territory was shot down, with politically destabilizing results. (The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, ejected safely, but was captured. He was eventually released from Soviet custody, and returned to California, where he died in 1977, while working as a traffic helicopter pilot for KNBC Channel 4, in Burbank. His helicopter ran out of fuel and crashed in the Sepulveda Basin). 

Originally built for the CIA, and flown out of Groom Lake, U-2s are still in use today, by the Air Force and NASA. Most of the ones still in service are at Beale Air Force Base, a surveillance base in Northern California. It’s likely they will be retired soon though, since their surveillance function has basically been replaced by UAVs, like the Global Hawk.

The other three aircraft at Blackbird Airpark are closely related to one another: the A-12, SR-71, and a D-21 drone. The A-12, also built by Lockheed for the CIA, was designed to replace the U-2, and was capable of flying higher than 90,000 feet, and at speeds exceeding 2,000 miles per hour. Made out of titanium, and flown out of Area 51, the A-12 was one of the most innovative and extreme aircraft ever built. 13 of them were made, between 1962 and 1964, and they were retired in 1968. The A-12 was replaced by the very similar SR-71 Blackbird, which Lockheed built for the Air Force. 32 of these were made, and they were in regular service at Beale Air Force Base until 1989. NASA kept two flying until 1999. The SR-71 is still the fastest and highest flying production aircraft ever made. In 1990 an SR-71 flew from Plant 42 to Washington, D.C., to be delivered to the Smithsonian. It made the trip in 68 minutes. 

After talking, looking around, and visiting the small gift shop at the airpark, the group gets back on the bus. If we were to go east on Avenue P, we would eventually encounter General Atomics’ UAV sites, and Lockheed’s radar cross-section site in Helendale. But with limited time, and much to see, we go west, and take Highway 14, northbound. At Avenue G, we pass Fox Field, in the distance to the west, a busy fire-fighting aircraft base. Also located here are buildings that once housed the Milestones of Flight Air Museum, one of the few aviation museums in the region. It closed more than a decade ago. Much of its collection came from William Barnes, who once ran the airport, along with his mother, Pancho Barnes. 

Pancho Barnes is a legendary figure in the early days of aerospace. She was a pioneering and barnstorming pilot, who did stunts for movies, including Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels, in 1930. In 1935 she purchased 180 acres near here, as a fly-in dude ranch, and eventually opened a bar and restaurant, called the Happy Bottom Flying Club, which was frequented by her Hollywood friends and test pilots training for the nascent space program nearby. Some of the stories of the test pilots’ antics at the Happy Bottom Riding Club were recounted in the Tom Wolfe book The Right Stuff, which was turned into a popular film in 1983. 

Her ranch was near Rogers Dry Lake, and with the expansion of activities at what would become Edwards Air Force Base, she was bought out and forced out by the Air Force in the mid-1950s, following a fire that destroyed much of her property. She died in 1975, and the site of her club has become a historic site at Edwards, part of the legend of the early Jet Age transitioning into the Space Age. 

Rogers Dry Lake: The End of Drainage
Another mile or two north, at Avenue D, we pass a large concrete brutalist structure, looking like an off-planet command center of some kind. This is the Lancaster Water Reclamation Plant, which processes the liquid wastes of the region chemically and in a network of ponds. This is a reminder that we are at the end of the line, hydrologically speaking, where the drainage of the region is processed, and dribbles out of the plant into the Piute Ponds, at the end of Amargosa Creek, and on the shores of Rosamond Dry Lake. 

Rosamond and Rogers Dry Lakes are next to one another, with the Happy Bottom Riding Club site in between them. Edwards Air Force Base grew up around Rogers because it was the largest dry lakebed in Southern California, and only 60 miles from Los Angeles; the biggest and best landing surface imaginable for experimental aircraft. After World War II it became the cradle and nursery for aerospace in the Jet Age, and continues to be the nation’s primary aviation research and evaluation field test base.

Around 10,000 people work within the 480 square miles of restricted land of Edwards Air Force Base. Tenants include the Armstrong Flight Research Center, NASA’s primary atmospheric flight research and test facility, and the Air Force’s test pilot school, Air Force Test Center, and a propulsion research test site on Leuhman Ridge. 

Hangars and structures for current and past aviation projects line ten miles of Rogers Dry Lake’s western shore, from South Base, where the loading pit for the Bell X-1 (the first plane to break the sound barrier) is preserved, and the latest stealth bombers are tested; through the main base, with its contractors’ row of hangars; through NASA hangars; to North Base, with the remains of a Jet Propulsion Lab rocket fuel research facility, and a hangar remaining from the days when North Base was the first test area on the lakebed. Facilities at the main base include the largest anechoic chamber in the nation; Joshua Control, the communications hub for the hundreds of square miles of restricted airspace above the desert of Southern California; and the Air Force Flight Test Museum.

A couple miles further up Highway 14 and we arrive at the town of Rosamond, and the main road to Edwards. The road goes through the north edge of the Rosamond lakebed, posted with “no access” and “no photography” signs, before the entry station, where public access is restricted. 
 

Outside the gate a few aircraft are on display, next to a partially constructed large steel shed spanning a concrete pad. This is the site of a new Air Force Flight Test Museum, expected to open in a year or two, to house some of the collection that is on display at the current Air Force Flight Test Museum, which is located in the main base area at Edwards, and is not open to the public. The new museum, located outside the gate, will be. 

In the meantime, the partially finished museum, where photography continues to be restricted, is hardly worth the trip. And though the CLUI has taken tour groups into the base and visited the on-base museum many years ago, doing so these days is more complicated, and requires clearing everyone on the bus weeks beforehand, and more, if anyone is a foreign national. Plus the museum is closed on weekends anyways. So we don’t head down the road to the gate from Rosamond. We just talk about it while continuing north on Highway 14, along a stretch of road that some maps label as the Aerospace Highway. 

A few miles north of Rosamond, as we approach the town of Mojave, the bus enters into an intense and widespread industrialized desert region. It starts when we begin to see the solar panels recently installed in the northwest corner of Edwards, in part of what is known as the Edwards & Sanborn Solar Plant, which opened in 2024, and has two million solar panels delivering 864 megawatts of power, and 121,000 lithium battery assemblies, totaling 3,287 megawatt hours of energy storage, making this the largest single solar plant and battery energy storage project in the world, at the moment. And it is just one of several current and expanding solar plants in the area. 

To the west is a forest of thousands of wind powered electrical generators, much of it known as the Alta Wind Energy Center, which extends into the Tehachapi Pass. This is the largest wind power production site in California, capable of generating more than 1,500 megawatts.

Off the left side of the bus, Soledad Mountain can be seen, heavily re-contoured and transformed by the Golden Queen Mine, one of the largest and last gold mines in California. Mining here started in a major way in the early 1900s, as a silver mine known as the Silver Queen. It started up again in 2014 as a gold mine, using the cyanide heap-leach process to extract trace amounts of gold and silver from crushed rocks dug out of massive pits on the side of the mountain.

Across from this, on the right side of the highway, is another kind of silver mine, operated by a company called Commodity Resource and Environmental. Much of photography, including film and x-rays, once used silver-based coatings to capture images. This facility chemically recovers millions of dollars of silver from image media shipped here from all over the country, every year. Though this is the main plant, the company is based in Burbank, and has worked with the Southern California film industry for decades. It is one of the last places that does this—physically erasing film, Hollywood’s expensive ephemeral product, and rendering its images back into bulk materials. 

Next to this facility is a much bigger plant that makes coatings, composites, and sealants for aerospace applications. It is operated by PPG Aerospace, part of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass company, better known for its paints and architectural glass products, and headquartered in a famous glassy postmodern office tower in downtown Pittsburgh.

Topping off this collection of industries south of Mojave is a liquid asphalt terminal and a small agricultural chemical complex. Though the area might look like a desert to some, it is clear that we are in a land that is being intensely used, and is anything but empty.
 

Time for Lunch
At Mojave, the bus heads east on Highway 58, then turns into the Mojave Air and Space Port, where lunch has been prepared for all 57 of us, at the Voyager Restaurant. Located in the admin building at the base of the tower, on the airport’s flight line, the restaurant is part and parcel of this singular civilian airport, and seats inside have a view of the runway.

Mojave Air and Space Port is a former World War II airfield that evolved into a major center for civilian aerospace research and development. The innovative aviation company Scaled Composites has been based here for decades, developing unusual aircraft, including SpaceShipOne, which flew from here into suborbital space in 2003, making Mojave Airport the first commercial spaceport in the USA. 

The principal designer at Scaled Composites was Burt Rutan, a legend in aviation history. In the 1980s he designed and built the Voyager airplane, the first aircraft to fly around the world without refueling. Flown by his brother, Dick Rutan, and Jeana Yeager (no relation to the famous test pilot Chuck Yeager), the airplane took off from Edwards, as it required almost three miles of runway to get into the air when fully loaded with fuel, and returned to Edwards nine days later, with just a few hours of fuel left. 

More recently Scaled Composites built the Stratolaunch aircraft, which serves as an airborne platform to launch smaller crafts, held under its wing, between its twin fuselages, into space. First flown in 2019, and housed in a massive hangar at the airport, it has the longest wingspan of any aircraft ever flown, 385 feet. Scaled Composites has also worked on stealth programs and drones. While the company was bought by Northrop Grumman in 2007, most of its operations continue to be based here.

Other civilian aerospace projects at Mojave Airport over the years include the Rotary Rocket program, XCOR Aerospace, Vector Launch, and Virgin Galactic, which still has its untested spaceport in New Mexico. Other tenants at the airport include the National Test Pilot School, the only civilian test pilot school in the country, and BAE Systems, which turns old fighter jets into target drones here, amongst other things.

North of the runways is a large commercial airliner storage area and an aviation scrap yard, where more than 100 airliners are usually parked, some between owners or temporarily out of service, others slowly being parted out. Beyond them are several fuel and engine development sites.  

After lunch, group members have time to explore a bit on foot. It is Plane Crazy Saturday at the airport, as it is every third Saturday of the month, and a number of aircraft and pilots, who are happy to talk, are out on the flight line. Back on the bus, the group tours the back of the buildings on the flight line, from Scaled Composites on the west end, to the Test Pilot School on the east, and we point out Virgin Galactic and the Stratolaunch hangar, visible on Highway 58, eastbound. 

Highway 58: Mojave to Kramer Junction
East of Mojave are more solar plants being installed, at the gates to the Hyundai Proving Grounds, and around the AT&T communications building, on a low rise next to the highway. Though the microwave relay antennas have been removed from the deck of its tower (a space called the "dance floor” by some technicians), the facility is still in use as part of this vital communications corridor. The building has thousands of square feet in above-ground space and underground space, too.

In the rambling open land northeast of the AT&T site is a memorial for the 1948 crash of an experimental plane, the Northrop YB-49. The unusual plane, one of only three ever made, was the first jet-powered flying wing. The tailless craft was all wing, 172 feet wide and 53 feet long, with space inside for a crew of six people. It was the harbinger of Northrop’s B-2 and B-21 stealth bombers that followed, many years later. Flown out of Edwards, it fell out of the sky on a test flight, with most of the craft hitting the ground two miles northeast of the AT&T facility. All on board were killed, including Captain Glen Edwards. The Air Force Base was renamed in his honor. 

In a few miles, we pass the road that heads north to California City. This desert community of 15,000 people is the state’s third largest city, in land area, behind Los Angeles and San Diego. Beyond its ovoid core, with an artificial lake and a retirement home, is an extensive network of notional numbered roads and meandering cul-de-sacs, etched into the dirt of the desert. It also has a prison on its fringe, which was the state’s first private prison, a massive isolated fortress-like building that when lit up at night, was visible from all over the northern Mojave. The prison opened in 1999, and housed a few thousand people at its peak, when drug laws filled prisons across California. It was closed in 2024, and is currently empty.

To the south, Highway 58 follows the fence line of Edwards Air Force Base. Visible on the tops of the low hills on base are a number of dish antennas pointed upwards, connecting to military communication satellites. They are located on Baker-Nunn Road, named after the engineers who originally developed satellite tracking technology, James Baker and Joseph Nunn. Equipment on this ridge was part of an early network of earth stations established to track and observe other nations’ satellites. Baker also developed optics for the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes, and other long range optical systems, ground-based and space-based, built mostly by PerkinElmer.

Also on the ridge are extremely long-distance cameras that track aircraft on test flights and provide real-time video, which was recorded on film, then videotape, and now digitally. This is one of the most observant ridges in the nation.

We pass the northern entrance to Edwards, next to North Base, where the remains of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory rocket fuel facility are visible from the road, at the northern end of Rogers Dry Lake. 

In a few miles more, on the left, the U.S. Borax mine begins to dominate the scene. The largest open pit mine in California, its operations extend for six miles from east to west, and four miles north to south. In the middle is an industrial processing plant, and the visitor center is on top of piles of overburden above the pit. Operated by Rio Tinto, the pit and plant produce a third of the world’s borates, which are used in all sorts of commercial and industrial materials and products, from soaps to fertilizers. Borates are also used in optical satellite lenses, aircraft composites, and rocket fuel. 

South of Highway 58 is Leuhman Ridge, looming above the town of Boron. Also known as Rocket Ridge, the hill is covered by several rocket engine test facilities, part of the eastern 65-square-mile portion of Edwards that is operated by the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Propulsion Directorate. Mostly busy from the 1950s to 1970s, the ridge no longer provides fiery spectacles with flaming rocket motors bolted to the earth—though its assets remain, should the need arise. 

The Air Force Research Lab is a multi-site Air Force entity, concerned with directed energy weapons, space-related defense, and propulsion systems. The Lab is headquartered at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, and has branches at Kirtland AFB in New Mexico, Rome Lab in New York, and at Brooks AFB in Texas. In addition to the rocket testing sites here are other facilities that serve the Space Experiments Directorate, including a space simulation facility that is part of the Astronautics Lab.
 

The bus turns onto Twenty Mule Team Road in Boron, and parks in front of its next destination, the Boron Aerospace Museum. The one-room museum is locally run and jam-packed with displays and artifacts from decades of aviation activities in the region, and outside a few aircraft are on display. Much of its collection is from the Milestones of Flight Air Museum, after it shut down at Fox Field. Until the Air Force Flight Test Museum opens outside the gates at Edwards, this is the only public museum about the unequalled and unprecedented aerospace activity that has occurred, and occurs still, at Edwards and throughout the Antelope Valley. 

The museum staff was forewarned of our visit, and is excited to see us arrive. They ask us to pose for a group portrait in front of the museum, with the bus in the background, before we are split into three groups, led separately through the collections, indoors and out. The gift shop does brisk business, too. 

Highway 58: Kramer Junction to Hinkley
Back on Highway 58, we pass the historic solar plant at Kramer Junction. Built in response to the energy crisis of the late 1970s, and going online in the 1980s, Kramer Junction was the second largest of three solar power plants in the area, built at the same time, which together comprised all of the large-scale solar power in the USA for nearly 20 years.

Kramer Junction was the site of Solar Energy Generating System (SEGS) III through VII, which had the capacity of generating 150 megawatts. Further east at Harper Lake, plants VIII and IX produced 160 megawatts, and SEGS I and II, near Daggett, produced another 44 megawatts. 

They were all thermal solar plants, not photovoltaic plants, using rows of parabolic mirrors to heat up tubes of oil, which boiled water, generating steam, which generated electricity. This technology requires a considerable amount of maintenance, and has mostly been replaced by photovoltaics, which became cheaper as production increased. 

Starting around 2010, large-scale solar power generating stations were built at a rapid pace. There are now hundreds in the southwestern USA that produce more than 100 megawatts each, with some generating more than 800 megawatts, like the one we saw south of Mojave. The three original SEGS sites have either been converted to photovoltaics, or shut down. This one, at Kramer Junction, has done a bit of both.

Visible on a hill north of Kramer Junction is a large white radome, atop a tall concrete base. This is a radar facility that is significant currently and historically. Once known as the Boron Air Force Station, it was originally operated as part of Edwards Air Force Base. It became one of 28 sites in an early large-scale national air defense radar system, known as the Lashup Radar Network. In 1954 the RAND Corporation installed an early test for the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) system at Boron. SAGE integrated more than 150 Air Force radar stations like this around the country by the late 1950s, and was the first nationwide radar system. 

The Boron Air Force Station was demilitarized in 1975, and the dozens of buildings became a federal prison camp, housing a few hundred minimum security inmates. The radar facilities, though, were retained by the FAA, as part of the Joint Surveillance System, one of a few hundred radar sites that are part of the nation’s current network of civilian/military aviation radar. 

The prison was closed in 2000, and the buildings have been removed, but the FAA radar tower continues to operate. Across the highway from it is another, smaller radar tower, which is part of the national weather radar network, comprised of 159 NEXRAD doppler radar towers installed across the nation.

Ten miles further east on Highway 58, on the south side of the highway,  there once was a radio tower as tall as the Empire State Building. Located at Hawes Auxiliary Airfield, a former practice airfield from World War II, the tower was part of the Survivable Low Frequency Communications System, developed by the Air Force in the 1960s, to help keep the federal chain of command communicating during and after a nuclear war. 

Radiating out from the guyed tower like spokes were hundreds of copper cables, as long as the tower was high, buried in the ground, creating a ground mat that served as a counterpoise for the antennas on the tower. 

Powered by a 110-kilowatt transmitter, the tower would send and receive simple messages using very long radio waves, with a similar tower at Silver Creek, Nebraska, near the Strategic Air Command headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base. Messages were distributed to flying command posts on board doomsday planes, and to ICBM missile base command posts across the country.

The tower was built on top of a two-story hardened concrete building, mostly underground and covered by earth, which contained the transmitters, electrical generators, and computer equipment that operated the system, manned by a crew that commuted from Edwards. The system operated from 1968 to 1986. When it closed, the tower was brought down by explosives, and most of the equipment was removed. The site remained open and unattended after that, and attracted all kinds of unsanctioned activities. In 2008, after two local teenagers were found murdered in the blackened bunker, the BLM and Air Force completed the demolition of the facility. 

Hawes’ tower and mound are no longer visible from the bus traveling on the highway, though another operation next to it is both visible and smellable. The site, called Nursery Products, is a major outdoor composting site for biosolids from sewage treatment plants all over Southern California, including the Hyperion plant next to El Segundo. The damp clumpy material arrives by a continuous stream of trucks, and is dumped into windrows on a half-mile-long spreading ground to dry out, and mixed with plant waste and other material, before being bagged and shipped out as Class A compost, for agricultural use. 

Agricultural use of sewage sludge collected from municipal wastewater plants has been standard practice for decades all over the country. What is surprising is how most people are unaware of this, or refuse to cognitively ingest it. And the smell. This facility is located here because it is close enough to urban areas to be economical, but far enough from people to be viable. It is a balance of proximities: the concentrated byproduct of urban density, finding its antipode, “away,” in the desert. It is a vivid manifestation of the here/there dialectic, remotely sensed not by the electromagnetic spectrum, but by a finely tuned biological sensor—the nose. 

DRS: Arrival and Departure
We are now approaching the town of Hinkley, north of which is our ultimate destination, the Desert Research Station. Hinkley is a small desert community, made smaller over the years by Pacific Gas and Electric, which has been buying out residents and erasing their homesteads for decades. It started in the 1990s, when the company was accused of contaminating the groundwater with hexavalent chromium, by using unlined disposal ponds at its pipeline compressor station in town, sickening the residents that drank from their wells. This led to unprecedented out-of-court settlements amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, due to the efforts of a legal aide named Erin Brockovich, who took up the case on behalf of the residents. Hinkley became even better known after a Hollywood film about the story was released in 2000, with Julia Roberts winning an Academy Award for her performance as Erin Brockovich. 

The bus turns north on Hinkley Road, passing the erased site where the post office once stood, across from the site of the school, erased a few years ago, and a few homesteads, erased over the last year. A lighthouse is visible on a hill to the west, built in 2017 by the artist Daniel Hawkins, a romantically forlorn beacon of hope in the ocean of desert, perhaps. In a few miles the DRS appears after a rise in the road descends into the Harper Dry Lake Valley, beyond the range of the underground plume. 

Captive Audience 
After an hour or two visiting the Remote Sensing exhibits inside the DRS building, and along the walking trail, the group gets back on the bus for the journey back to Los Angeles, in the setting sun. 

To take up the time (about two hours in the dark on Interstates 15 and 10), and to sort of sum things up, we wanted to show a film. We thought of Nope, but, like its name, decided against it, as it’s a bit intense, and perhaps not fair to inflict on a captive audience. We also thought of The Falcon and the Snowman, since it was about the famous spy scandal at Space Park, but it is mostly about other things, such as Sean Penn playing an obnoxious person. Erin Brockovich? Not so much about remote sensing and aerospace. War Games? Kind of goofy, and mostly about Matthew Broderick’s charm, as well as nuclear war.

We were looking for something that was simple, unsubtle, and kind of coarse, so it wouldn’t be marred by the small overhead monitors and scratchy speakers on the bus. Something that was already kind of bad, but in a good way, where the themes and issues were consistent and compelling, despite being embedded in a bit of camp. Something that was not so annoying or percussive that it couldn’t be ignored by people who just wanted to chat or look out the window. And ideally with a happy ending, since it’s been a tough month for everyone, with more bleak times ahead. 

We settled on The Philadelphia Experiment, a Hollywood movie from 1984, about secret military cloaking technologies, and the gap between disappearance and visibility, space and time. Early drafts of the script were written by John Carpenter, a filmmaker known for simple, solid—if not a bit monolithic—science fiction movies, like The Fog, The Thing, and They Live. 

The experiment the movie title refers to is an alleged secret test conducted at a Navy shipyard in Philadelphia in 1943 that went awry: it made a battleship disappear, not just from radar, but, seemingly, in every other way too. An account by a purported witness of the experiment surfaced in 1955, and though generally considered a hoax, it created a persistent historical legend, that has echoed around ever since, as part of paranormal research and conspiracy lore. 

The film begins with a depiction of the 1943 experiment, and follows with a second contemporary test, conducted at a secret base in the desert in 1984, which also goes awry, but this time makes the base and the whole town it’s in disappear. The main character, a sailor who jumped overboard while the ship was disappearing in 1943, ends up in the 1984 town, in the midst of its disappearance. The problem, as it usually is in these time travel tales, is that his presence, like a fly in the ointment, creates a rift in the space-time continuum, and the world, and maybe the universe, is about to blow up. To stop this, he has to get back on the ship, which is also stuck in the increasingly swirling space-time vortex, and he must shut down the particle beam reactor-type thing on the ship that originally created this mess. Which he does, and he gets the girl, and we get the happy ending, too. 

The movie connects advances in technology brought on by World War II, including the invention of radar and nuclear annihilation, with the defense boom times of the Reagan years, 40 years further into radar and nuclear weaponry, where SDI/Star Wars and other known and unknown electromagnetic detection and evasion technologies flourished. And watching The Philadelphia Experiment now, as a cultural artifact, yet another 40 years later, brings our own context to the film, with our progress in situational awareness, and virtual experiences—including being on a bus trip to the desert to witness experiments about seeing and not, and being here, and not.

The film wraps up as we get off the freeway in Culver City, the “heart of screenland," in the Ballona Creek Basin, and we park outside the CLUI, right back where we started. Nothing seems to have changed in the ten hours that have elapsed. Though nothing will ever be the same, either. ♦