STATION STARS THANK MAKER; ASTRONAUTS CELEBRATE ROCKETDYNE ENGINEERS.

Byline: Phil Davis Daily News Staff Writer

A trio of astronauts who joined the first modules of the International Space Station stopped by Boeing's Rocketdyne Propulsion & Power plant to thank 600 workers for not leaving them in the dark.

They told employees the aerospace firm's De Soto Avenue facility in Canoga Park that the space station electrical system they designed and built worked flawlessly.

``Hey, we - all of us - built a space station,'' shuttle commander Robert Cabana told an assembly of about 300 workers.

In December, Cabana led the first of dozens of missions to assemble the station, with mission specialists Nancy Currie and Jerry Ross.

The Rocketdyne system, 10 years in the making, was crucial because it provides electricity to run the station's life support systems. On Wednesday, astronauts and engineers admitted to a collective sigh of relief when the station's lights and computers came on without a glitch.

``You couldn't see us because we had our gold visors down, but we were smiling pretty big,'' said Ross, the veteran spacewalker who connected a tangle of power cords and other essential systems on the Russian-built Zarya control center and the American-built Unity module 250 miles above the Earth.

``It's something you can tell your grandchildren about,'' Ross said. ``When you look up in the early morning or late evening sky and see the brightest star in the sky go by, you can tell them you had a part in making that happen.''

Boeing engineers, who knew the astronauts' lives depended on their work, watched the 12-day mission anxiously from their new Canoga Park engineering support room. The astronauts dedicated the room Wednesday.

``They came to be kind of an extended family up there. We had to take care of them,'' a beaming Cathy Martinez-Menne said after meeting the astronauts she knew only from TV monitors and radio transmissions.

The $52.7 billion International Space Station, which will ultimately be about the size of a football field, is already visible from Earth. According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, it will be the ``brightest new star on the horizon'' when completed in 2004.

Its electricity comes from massive solar arrays that channel power into batteries and conduits - all designed and manufactured in the Valley.

The Boeing workers were thrilled to meet their ``eyes, hands and ears'' in space, which is how the astronauts describe themselves. Rocketdyne employees in Canoga Park and Huntington Beach have worked on the space station electrical system project for more than a decade - before Boeing acquired the company.

``They hooked up all our stuff and turned the lights on,'' said Byron Wood, vice president and general manager for the Canoga Park facility. ``It's an awesome thing to think about.''

The astronauts presided over the official ribbon-cutting for the engineering support room, which is linked to real-time data from the space station's power systems. Engineers are on call in the room around the clock to troubleshoot space station power systems for NASA or the Russian space agency.

Later in the day, the astronauts stopped by the Boeing-Rocketdyne plant on Canoga Avenue to meet with workers who build the shuttle's main engines.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

PHOTO (1) Astronaut Robert Cabana, center, signs autographs Wednesday for Rocketdyne employees in Canoga Park who worked on the space station.

(2) Jerry Ross, center, and fellow astronauts Robert Cabana and Nancy Currie speak at Rocketdyne.

John Lazar/Daily News