EDWARDS REBUILDS TEST STATION\Rocket lab standing by to catch ride on space-business upswing.

Byline: Jim Skeen Daily News Staff Writer

Much of Col. Robert Karner's attention these days is focused on a concrete-and-steel rocket test stand on Leuhman Ridge idled since the end of the Apollo moon mission program.

Mothballed since the early 1970s, test stand 1-A is being refurbished at a cost of $6.7 million to accommodate tests of a new generation of rocket engines.

Officials at Phillips Laboratory's Propulsion Directorate - more commonly known as the rocket lab - hope to complete the project this fall, allowing contractors to test large rocket engines being considered for a program in 1997.

The engine program, called the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle, is part of a booming space business that the laboratory wants to capture.

"I've been in the space business for 20 years. This is one of the biggest upswings in 10 years," said Karner, director of the rocket lab. "A major impetus is to drive down the cost of access to space."

The upswing in the space business is coming at a time when the rocket lab, like other military units, is being pinched by shrinking defense budgets. As recently as 1988, the laboratory's operating budget was $110 million. It is now $60 million.

"There will be considerable pressure to downsize," Karner said.

The laboratory is facing the prospects of cuts between 10 percent and 15 percent between 1997 and 2000. It is coming to the point where decisions will have to made as whether cuts will be absorbed across the board or whether it is time to begin dropping areas of research, Karner said.

One piece of good news is that a former rocket laboratory leader, Col. Michael Heil, is now in charge of all of Phillips Laboratory. Heil will bring to the job a sense of empathy for life at remote operating locations like the propulsion directorate, Karner said.

To borrow the mantra of NASA administrator Dan Goldin, the rocket lab will have to find ways to do things "better, faster, cheaper," Karner said.

"The impetus is getting hardware out, working with industry, and making a significant contribution," Karner said. "There is a big emphasis to get the hardware out there. We have to get it out of the lab and into industry."

With a staff of 230 military and Defense Department workers and an additional 270 contractor personnel, the rocket lab is one of the biggest tenants of Edwards Air Force Base.

The rocket lab was created as an extension of the Army Air Corps Power Plant Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. In 1947, an Army Air Corps committee selected Edwards as the site for conducting high-thrust rocket testing. By the early 1950s, the first rocket test stands were ready for use.

In 1959, research and technology work carried out in Ohio was transferred to the rocket laboratory.

The rocket lab is vast, covering 65 square miles - about the size of Washington, D.C. The layout of the lab takes advantage of the vastness to separate and isolate test and research complexes, a concession to the hazards of rocket research.

The dominant geographical feature of the laboratory is Leuhman Ridge, a granite ridge overlooking Rogers Dry Lake. The ridge is named after Arno Leuhman, the Army officer who surveyed what is now Edwards Air Force base in 1936.

For the most part the rocket test stands on the ridge are unsightly skeletons of steel and concrete, hanging along the edge of Leuhman Ridge. The most aesthetically pleasant of the bunch is a stand used for testing upgrades to the Titan IV boosters.

The test stand was damaged twice - once in September 1990, when a crane toppled, killing a civilian worker and igniting a segment of a rocket booster, and again in April 1991, when a design flaw turned a booster into a 112-foot-tall, 770,000-pound firecracker, blowing the superstructure apart.

When the test stand was rebuilt, the contractors painted a giant American flag on the superstructure as if to say "you can't burn this." When Titan IV tests resumed in June 1992, they went without a hitch.

There are 60 test stands scattered about the laboratory. Some are geared toward testing small engines, some with as little as .01 pounds of thrust. Others are enormous, standing 200 feet tall and capable of handling engines with 1.7 million pounds of thrust.

"We are a full spectrum facility for research and testing," said laboratory spokesman Ranney Adams. "You name it, we probably did the initial testing for it."

The Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle represents a return for the Air Force to the development of a big rocket engine after a decade of modifying existing systems.

The EELV program is intended to reduce the cost of putting a payload into space and replacing the existing fleet of Delta, Atlas and Titan rockets, all born in the 1950s.

The EELV program will use a 13-story-tall, concrete-and-steel-frame test stand built at a cost of $11 million in 1956 for the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile program.

The stand's superstructure was destroyed in a March 1959 accident and rebuilt in 1960 to test the F-1 Saturn rocket engines for the Apollo moon mission program.

The rocket lab is also a partner in research led by Lockheed Martin for the development of an engine concept for the proposed X-33 spaceship. The rocket lab is conducting ground tests on a working 1/10 scale engine model in preparation of flights atop an SR-71 Blackbird research plane later this spring.

Other areas of research include developing new sources of rocket fuel; developing techniques for recycling fuel from demilitarized solid rocket motors; and the development of a new class of materials - a cross between ceramics and plastics - that is heat-resistance and durable.

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PHOTO

Photo (color in AV edition only) A 1960's-era steel-and-concrete-framed rocket test station at Edwards Air Force Base is getting a $6.7 million face lift.