ARTISTIC ENGINEERS TECH TEAM BUILDS PROPS.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

PALMDALE - Antelope Valley aerospace companies are best known in the nation's capital for making high-tech military jets.

But Lockheed Martin and Scaled Composites are getting notice now for something entirely different: giant high-tech stage props.

For a Kennedy Center dance production, workers from the two companies crafted Styrofoam, Fiberglas and carbon-fiber sculptures with unlikely names like Alexander's Lure and Gandhara.

``People want to be involved in positive things and things that are different,'' Lockheed Martin engineer Richard Bott said of the appeal of the mostly volunteer effort, which took hundreds of man-hours over three years.

Added Lockheed Martin engineer Steve Slaughter: ``Off-the-wall stuff has always appealed to me.''

Gandhara and Alexander's Lure, with a third giant piece called Helix, were centerpieces last weekend in Moving Forward Dance Company's ``Trilogy'' performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Gandhara is 21 feet long and 9 1/2 feet tall, but at 385 pounds light enough for dancers to move around on stage.

Alexander's Lure is a 10-foot-tall, 280-pound ovoid, suspended by a chain and looking, says Scaled Composites Vice President Mike Melvill, like ``a big plumb bob.''

Replicating Washington sculptor John Dreyfuss' complex shapes meant carving them out of giant chunks of Styrofoam with a computerized milling machine, then covering them over with Fiberglas and carbon-fiber skins.

One difficulty was reproducing exactly the subtle curves and angles of something like Gandhara, which is supposed to be a stylized vertebra and is named for an ancient civilization in Pakistan.

The answer was a laser-measuring device, which Pennsylvania company SMX Corp. set up in Dreyfuss' Washington home studio.

The laser created a digital image, which at Lockheed Martin's Fort Worth plant was turned into a Catella computer file. The sculptor visited Forth Worth and made changes to the three-dimensional model on a computer.

Then the computer file was e-mailed to Scaled Composites in Mojave, where it was used to program a milling machine large enough to shape an object 35 feet long.

``It's a complex shape to duplicate,'' Melvill said of Gandhara. ``It's a big thing - it's weird too.''

Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. spokeswoman Dianne Knippel sees in the effort the spirit of the company's legendary Skunk Works, creator of the SR-71 spy plane and F-117 stealth fighter: ``Got to get it done; be creative.''

Lockheed Martin became involved in a dance production by chance.

Company executives in 1999 attended a meeting at the sculptor's historic Georgetown mansion, which is opened up for conferences and weddings.

Dreyfuss was working on a giant plaster version of Gandhara, and explained to the executives he needed to make a copy light enough and strong enough for dancers to move around on stage.

``Our course, one of our executives said, 'We make airplanes. They're light and strong. Maybe we can help out,' '' Bott said.

For Scaled Composites, it was a chance to use a milling machine and crew that otherwise would have been idle.

Scaled Composites employees are used to building famed aircraft designer Burt Rutan's one-of-a-kind exotic fighter planes or high-altitude surveillance craft, but they are very proud of working on Gandhara, Melvill said.

``They talk more about it,'' Melvill said. ``We've got guys walking around in T-shirts with it on it.''

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Lockheed Martin engineer Richard Bott, center, stands with the Moving Forward Dance Company and the sculpture Gandhara.