McDonnell Douglas Rocket Plans Uncertain

HUNTINGTON BEACH — McDonnell Douglas Co.’s Space and Defense Systems unit disclosed Friday that it no longer considers its Orange County headquarters the only choice for a big new rocket-building operation and is looking at sites in three other states.

The company in December listed its Huntington Beach facility as the primary fabrication site for the Delta IV family of rockets it proposes to build for the Air Force under a $1.4-billion development contract it is seeking.

But officials said Friday they now are looking for the most cost-effective manufacturing site and have identified seven candidates, including Huntington Beach, for the 1.25-million-square-foot facility that would provide as many as 3,000 jobs.

The other sites in contention are Huntsville and Decatur, Ala.; Yellow Creek and Bay St. Louis, Miss.; and Cocoa Beach and Titusville, Fla. McDonnell Douglas has operations in Huntsville and Titusville.

The announcement spurred Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to send a letter to McDonnell Douglas Chief Executive Harry Stonecipher, urging him to locate the rocket building program in Huntington Beach so California would benefit from the new jobs.

McDonnell Douglas has said the Delta IV facility would create “several thousand jobs,” and Boxer on Friday said she understood the numbers to range from 2,000 to 3,000.

About 5,600 people now work at McDonnell Douglas Space and Defense Systems in Huntington Beach. The new jobs would almost all be manufacturing positions.

A spokeswoman at the company’s Space and Defense Systems division said officials plan to pick a site by late summer but stressed that the company has not decided if it will proceed with the program if it doesn’t win the Air Force contract.

The contract for design, development and testing of a so-called evolved expendable launch vehicle, or EELV, is scheduled to be awarded in mid-1998. Defense giant Lockheed Martin Corp. is the other competitor.

McDonnell Douglas says it would use the new facility to manufacture a common first-stage rocket core, roughly the size of an MD-11 jet aircraft body, that could quickly be modified to serve as the basis for any one of three configurations of the Delta IV, depending on the size of the payload.