COLUMBIA LOSS FELT SPACE PROGRAM HAS STRONG ROOTS IN A.V. REGION.

Byline: Greg Botonis and Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writers

PALMDALE - Space shuttle Columbia's destruction had a more personal impact here than in nearly any other American community.

This was where all five shuttles - including the ill-fated Challenger - were assembled in the 1970s and 1980s. Nearby Edwards Air Force Base hosted dozens of shuttle landings.

Hundreds of Antelope Valley residents worked on the shuttles, both during the assembly and for overhauls throughout the 1990s. Columbia's commander, Air Force Col. Rick Husband, served at Edwards for four years.

``I was devastated - it really tore me up,'' retired Rockwell employee Jim Beall, 67, said Saturday while watching news coverage with friends at the Lancaster Elks Lodge. ``I felt so close to it. You do it so much and you're with it so long that you become close to it.''

Columbia's commander, Air Force Col. Rick Husband, served at Edwards Air Force Base from 1988 to 1992. He attended Edwards' test pilot school, then was a test pilot for F-15 fighter jets, working as a program manager for a new jet engine and demonstrating F-15s in air shows.

Husband left Edwards for England in 1992 as an exchange test pilot, then was tapped by NASA to become an astronaut in 1994.

Edwards Air Force Base employee Mike Poulos had been a college student in 1981 when he stood among 300,000 cheering, flag-waving spectators to watch Columbia end the first shuttle mission at Edwards Air Force Base. In the next 20 years, he watched Challenger, Discovery and Atlantis either land or depart.

``This is just like the Challenger all over again,'' said Poulos, who learned of the disaster from visitors to the Blackbird Airpark, a Palmdale airplane exhibit, where he volunteers on weekends. ``I remember that like it was yesterday. There are the real tragedies of the 20th century that come to mind immediately - the Titanic, World War I and II, Kennedy's assassination and the Challenger. Now in the 21st century we have Sept. 11 and the Columbia and we're just beginning.''

After the 1986 Challenger explosion - when a faulty seal in a booster rocket blew up the craft on launch, killing its seven-person crew - NASA decided to build a replacement. Shuttle Endeavour put a thousand people to work in Palmdale.

There's no saying now what the government will do this time, since the basic shuttle technology is more than 20 years old. NASA has ideas for new spacecraft, but right now they are mostly just plans.

The shuttle fleet's newest job had been to take crew, construction materials and gear to and from the International Space Station. If NASA grounds the shuttles, only Russia's much smaller Mir capsule - similar to America's Apollo craft - will be able to reach the space station crew.

At Edwards on Saturday, few employees were at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, because Columbia had been expected to land in Florida. The center gears up as an alternative if Florida has bad weather, but this time the earliest Edwards landing was not expected till Tuesday.

A number of technicians from universities and other organizations that had science experiments aboard Columbia arrived last week, in case they were needed to unload the experiments, and a NASA jet that follows the shuttle in to its landing had arrived. But the full shuttle support crew had not arrived.

``The full recovery crew would not have been in until the day before,'' Dryden spokesman Alan Brown said.

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(ran in SAC and AV editions -- color in AV edition only) Poncitlan Park's flag flies at half-staff Saturday to mark the loss that morning of astronauts on the space shuttle Columbia, which burned upon re-entering the atmosphere over Texas.

Jeff Goldwater/Staff Photographer