Aerospace: Strength Through Change

After four months of tense anticipation by the aerospace industry, Washington last week chose a contractor for the nation's largest space project yet. To start work on the Apollo spacecraft, which is to carry three men to the moon and back, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration gave a $400 million initial order to Los Angeles' North American Aviation.

Though less well known to the public than many of its competitors (largely because no airliners carry its name), thrusting North American is the fourth biggest of aerospace companies, outranked only by General Dynamics, Boeing and Lockheed. In its annual report last week. North American reported sales of $1.3 billion for the business year ending Sept. 30, and profits of $27,750,000. By winning the Apollo contract—on which the Government plans to spend an estimated $20 billion during the next ten years—North American should in time push its sales close to the $2 billion mark.

Famine's Lesson. North American boasts that it leads all its competitors in total number of aircraft manufactured. Its P-51 Mustang was the finest U.S. long-range fighter in World War II. And it was North American's F-86, the U.S. Air Force's first swept-wing fighter, that kept Russian MIGs from gaining mastery of the Korean skies.

North American's skill at building military aircraft did it little direct good when, in the postwar famine for planemakers, its backlog of orders was cut from 8,000 planes to 24. But the high-powered research establishment and alert management that served it so well in the airframe business enabled the company to launch, quicker than most of its competitors, a crash diversification program. Today, with only 38% of its sales in aircraft, North American consists of six scientifically oriented divisions, each so large that it has its own president. The divisions:

·AUTONETICS, whose 1961 sales of $410 million place it among the nation's top ten electronics companies. Its specialty: inertial-navigation systems, one of which steered the nuclear submarines Nautilus and Skate under the polar icecap.

·ROCKETDYNE, which has produced the engines powering about 90% of U.S. missile and space flights. Chief current project: developing the Saturn and Nova clustered rockets to loft huge spacecraft on interplanetary jaunts.

·COLUMBUS (Ohio) DIVISION makes the sleek Vigilante, the Navy's Mach 2 carrier-based bomber.

·LOS ANGELES DIVISION built the X-15 rocket plane that has carried man in controlled flight higher (41 miles) and faster (4,093 m.p.h.) than ever before.

·ATOMICS INTERNATIONAL is perfecting compact nuclear reactors to provide electricity in space vehicles.

·SPACE & INFORMATION SYSTEMS will have the prime responsibility for the Apollo, will probably be assisted by four Mercury-seasoned subcontractors: Northrop (recovery system), AiResearch Manufacturing (environmental control within the capsule), Minneapolis-Honeywell (flight control), and Collins Radio (space-to-base communications).