This presentation will discuss what happened a little later on Pt. Loma as shown in the organizational history chart shown above. Two separate organizations formed and re-formed, organized and re-organized, to become what today is Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center San Diego. Along the way, they traded employees back and forth several times. They finally merged in 1977, and through BRAC in the early 1990s, lost a major product line and 350 jobs, gained a new major product line and 250 jobs, changed names a couple of more times, and moved from a “lab” to a full-spectrum organization with installation and life-cycle maintenance responsibilities.

On June 1, 1940, thirty-four years and 19 days after the Radio Station was commissioned, the Navy established its first West Coast laboratory, the Navy Radio and Sound Laboratory (NRSL), shown above. It was a couple hundred yards from the radio station. Tasking for this organization was to improve communications for sailors on ships at sea. Secondary responsibilities for the Officer-in-Charge, CDR J.B. Dow, his nine sailors and three civilian scientists, involved the study of two emerging technologies—radar and sonar—to determine if they held any value for the Navy.

Farther to the north and three years later, the Navy established its second West Coast lab, the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS), in the Mojave Desert at what would come to be known as China Lake. NOTS established an “annex” in Pasadena, staffed by professors from the California Institute of Technology who had initially left their classrooms in 1941 to volunteer for the war effort, designing, as Navy contractors, the Mousetrap anti-submarine rocket launcher. The CalTech scientists eventually set up the facility shown above, located between Foothill Boulevard and Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, and a number of them became Navy civilian engineers.

And finally, the labs’ engineers built things to test. In San Diego, it was 1/48th scale model ships, made of wood plated with brass. The reason? Shipboard communication problems initially believed caused by the weather and jamming were found in tests by NRSL in 1943 to actually stem from a closer, more controllable source—the ship itself. At HF frequencies, the engineers found, the entire platform was the receiver, and the increasingly large array of radiators on the topsides of ships, plus weapons launchers, smoke stacks, masts, and the like, were often responsible for communications problems. To generate the data required to ensure appropriate shipboard communications, the Center began building the scale models as shown above left and working them on the Model Range to generate antenna patterns. An important milestone at the range occurred in 1951, when NEL engineers reduced the number of antennas on the recommissioned USS Mount McKinley to one third of the original requirement, with no loss in performance. At the same time, NOTS engineers built more lethal torpedos that could be launched from airplanes flying higher and faster, and used the Variable Angle Launcher at Morris Dam, above right, to test their designs.

The following year, Dr. Lyon took the USS Skate to the North Pole, and this time punched through to daylight for the first surfacing at the pole.

NEL radio physicists conducted their first experiments with communications in space in 1960, using the Echo 1 satellite. Their experiments in super high frequency led to development of antennas and terminals that by 1965 allowed the Navy to operate a satellite system for over-the-horizon communications. In 1968, NELC installed this shipboard satellite terminal aboard the cruiser USS Providence shown above left, and successfully demonstrated the feasibility of satellite relay of fleet multi-channel broadcasts.

Increasing requirements for NELC to develop and integrate tactical C3I systems resulted in identification of the need for a major new facility. The result was Building 600, a secure and electromagnetically shielded facility shown above. The facility was initially called the Electronics Development And Test Laboratory (EDATL), but was later changed to the C3 Systems Integration Test and Evaluation (C3 SITE) facility. Completed in 1976, it provided huge laboratory spaces for assembling and testing full-scale shipboard C3 systems.

The Integrated Refractive Effects Prediction System (IREPS) allowed operational commanders, for the first time, to assess properly and exploit the serious effects atmospheric refractivity have on sensor and weapon systems performance. IREPS, shown above right, acquired and interpreted refractivity data from the lower atmosphere and displayed their effects on specific sensor and weapon systems in near real-time. The initial testing of IREPS aboard USS Enterprise in 1976 was so successful that it led to an immediate Fleet request for an interim operational capability, and ultimate fielding of IREPS on all deployed aircraft carriers.

1943
1967
1969
1970

To the north is the other principle organization forming SSC San Diego, the NOTS/
NUWC/NURDC/NUC organization.

On the Mark 46, Pasadena engineers not only designed and developed it, but supervised production, helped introduce it to the Fleet, and maintained and upgraded it in service. Mark 46 was the Navy’s first ASW torpedo to utilize a solid-rocket-fueled, hot-gas propulsion system. At four horsepower per pound of engine weight, the Mark 46 torpedo was capable of overtaking the most elusive submarine targets known at the time. It was the first ASW torpedo capable of launch by fixed wing aircraft at speeds up to 400 knots. Perhaps almost as significant as the weapon development itself was the development process. Official press releases announcing the completion of the Mark 46 program cited as the key element of its success the Navy’s concept of industrial partnership. Combined NOTS and contractor teams were instrumental in this program, showing the way for the future SSC San Diego-industry partnerships.

The very first CalTech program for the Navy was the Mousetrap anti-submarine rocket launcher. Building from that, the NOTS organization developed the Rocket-Assisted Torpedo (RAT) and finally the Anti-Submarine Rocket (ASROC) shown above at right. NOTS proposed the weapon as an alternative to a Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd) request to its labs in 1955 to consider the potential for launching a nuclear depth charge from ASW ships. NOTS engineers, concerned with the inflexibility of a weapon that would turn conflict suddenly nuclear, proposed a rocket-propelled weapon with a payload either of a nuclear depth charge or a conventional acoustic homing torpedo, specifically the Mark 44. BuOrd agreed with the concept of weapons flexibility, and in 1956 began funding NOTS development of ASROC.

NOTS engineers set up the Skyhook Testing facility shown above, a “pop-up” range at San Clemente Island, to determine exactly how to do that. Test after test was conducted with redwood logs and steel cylinders filled with concrete to determine the best mechanism to get a missile out of a submarine tube, through the water column, and far enough into the air to allow engine ignition. Their testing led to substantial re-design of the missile’s shape. Success came with the first live launch of a Polaris, conducted by the Center April 4, 1960, just a few months before the first Polaris submarine, USS George Washington, was commissioned.

The Center has done a lot of work for NAVSEA over the years, but shipbuilding was not included in the tasking. Nevertheless, a Center hydrodynamics engineer back in the early 1970s took a 1905 concept of reducing waterplane area to reduce ship motion and designed the Stable Semi-submerged Platform (SSP). To avoid the obvious problems NUC faced with no charter for ship design, Center money was used to pay for SSP and NUC got the Coast Guard shipyard in Curtis Bay, Md., to build it. Shipped to Hawaii, SSP, shown above at right, was christened Kaimalino, a Hawaiian word meaning “calm waters,” and used as a test platform. It was so stable that, at only 88 feet long with a displacement of about 200 tons, Navy and Coast Guard helicopters could land on it in relatively high seas.

NUWC lasted only a short time. The obvious name “warfare center” in the era of substantial Viet Nam war protests made recruiting about as difficult as it is today. Center headquarters moved to San Diego in 1968 and in 1969 the lab became the Naval Undersea Research and Development Center (NURDC). The Center needed a fair-sized laboratory, resulting in the construction of Bldg. 1 (on the right), eventually named in honor of Dr. McLean.

There’s an interesting story about Building 1. This building was built on a site that had some buildings that were scheduled for demolition. That work was not completed in time for the scheduled groundbreaking, which surely the facilities people visualized as the calm, traditional, time-honored, gold-shovel routine. Dr. McLean wanted something more exciting— he wanted to knock down one of the buildings with a bulldozer. Nobody could talk him out of it, so he and Captain Bishop, the Center Commander, donned hard hats and sat on the bulldozer while the operator proceeded to deal with the building. Once he got up there, however, Dr. McLean insisted that he was going to drive the bulldozer. The operator demurred, but it didn’t matter. Dr. McLean sat down in the operator’s seat and began pulling various handles. The operator frantically pointed to the correct ones, while Charlie Bishop held on for dear life. The bulldozer shovel went high overhead and Dr. McLean took a big chunk out of the roof of one of the buildings. Some time during his vigorous attack on the building, metal scraping on metal spewed sparks onto some dry wood, and a fire started. The groundbreaking ceremony ended with the bulldozer shrouded in smoke and fire engine sirens wailing in the distance.

The Marine Mammal Program, which actually originated in Pt. Mugu, moved to Hawaii to provide warmer water, not for the animals, but for the people working with them who had to spend a lot of time in the water. Begun in 1960 as the Advanced Marine Biological Systems program, its first operational systems were a sea lion recovery system called Quick Find, used for recovering ASROC quality assurance rounds, and a very secret dolphin system called Short Time. That was the amount of time provided for the Center to put together a system to provide swimmer defense protection for the Army ammunition pier at Cam Ranh Bay, a favorite target of North Vietnamese swimmer sappers. A young Navy EOD lieutenant named Les Bivens took a system developed in about a year to Vietnam, and shut down the pier attacks. Les eventually was the third manager of the program, after Bill Powell and Hop Porter. Quick Find and Short Time are now, respectively, the Mark 5 and Mark 6 Marine Mammal Systems. Shown above at left is the Mark 7 system, which employs bottlenose dolphins to mark bottom mines.

For some years in the late 1980s NOSC pursued a program to communicate with submarines via lasers deployed on aircraft. Dr. Tom Kaye was the program manager of that effort. One of his concerns was affordability of the system versus its positive effect on naval operations. The facility shown on the left, the Research, Evaluation and Systems Analysis (RESA) facility, was developed in 1989 to answer those questions. At the same time, coincidentally, the long-awaited Naval War College’s Enhanced Navy War-Gaming System was some months behind delivery schedule. NOSC jumped into the breech and employed RESA to provide war-gaming opportunities for battle group staffs prior to deployment while ENWGS was being completed.

One of the few shortcomings of ASROC was its launch mode. Fired from canisters at a fixed ballistic angle, ASROC could provide only limited coverage without turning the ship. With the advent of Vertical Launch Systems (VLS) on the Navy’s Spruance, Ticonderoga and Arleigh Burke classes of ships, NOSC re-designed ASROC for vertical launch mode as shown above right, enabling the weapon to provide 360-degree ASW standoff capabilities for those ships, plus the high rate of fire characterizing VLS weapons. VLA continues as the only weapons program in which the Center is still engaged. Of particular significance: The ASROC capability developed by Center engineers has now been in the fleet since 1960, and it is currently planned to continue as a viable anti-submarine weapon until the year 2025.