The axle king

Few aircraft companies have stranger roots. Willard Rockwell, born in Boston in 1888, made his fortune in 1919 with a new bearing system for truck axles. His business grew through mergers with Timken-Detroit Axle and the Standard Steel Spring Company into Rockwell-Standard, a Pittsburgh maker of axles, springs and brakes. Alongside it, the family’s Rockwell Manufacturing Company made valves, gas meters and power tools; in 1966 it introduced the world’s first power mitre saw.

Buying North American

In September 1967 Rockwell-Standard merged with North American Aviation of Los Angeles, the company of the Mustang, the Sabre and the X-15. The new North American Rockwell inherited a dark legacy: eight months earlier, three astronauts had died in a fire aboard a North American-built Apollo command module. The company rebuilt the spacecraft, and its Apollo modules carried crews to the Moon. In 1973, after buying the avionics maker Collins Radio, the group merged with Rockwell Manufacturing and took the name Rockwell International.

The bomber that would not die

Its signature aircraft was the B-1. Rockwell won the contest for a bomber that would combine the speed of the B-58 with the range of the B-52, and the first B-1A flew on 23 December 1974, later reaching Mach 2.22. On 30 June 1977 President Carter cancelled it in favour of cruise missiles and, secretly, stealth. Ronald Reagan campaigned on the decision, and on 2 October 1981 announced an order for 100 B-1Bs. All were delivered by 1988. The Bone first saw combat over Iraq in 1998 and was still one of the US Air Force’s three strategic bomber types in 2026.

Building the Shuttle

Rockwell was also the prime contractor for the Space Shuttle orbiter. All six orbiters — Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour — were assembled at Palmdale, California, with crew cabins and fuselages from Downey, payload bay doors from Tulsa and body flaps from Columbus, Ohio. Its Rocketdyne division built the Shuttle main engines. Columbia first flew in 1981. By the 1980s, under chief executive Bob Anderson, Rockwell had become the largest US defence contractor and the largest NASA contractor, with more than 115,000 employees.

Selling the wings

There were shadows. Rockwell ran the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Denver from 1975 to 1990, where it made plutonium triggers; mismanagement there was investigated by a special grand jury, and a homeowners’ lawsuit against Rockwell and Dow Chemical was settled for $375 million in 2016. Under Donald Beall the company turned towards electronics. It renamed itself Rockwell in 1995 and in December 1996 sold its aerospace and defence businesses, including the old North American Aviation, to Boeing. What remained split in 2001 into Rockwell Automation and Rockwell Collins.

Fabrieken

• Palmdale (Air Force Plant 42) · Palmdale, California — Final assembly of the B-1B and all Space Shuttle orbiters
• Downey plant · Downey, California — Shuttle crew cabin, thermal protection and fuselage sections; Apollo spacecraft
• Tulsa plant · Tulsa, Oklahoma — Shuttle payload bay doors
• Columbus plant · Columbus, Ohio — Shuttle body flap
• Rockwell International Science Center · Thousand Oaks, California — Research laboratory founded by North American in 1962; invented MOVPE; sold to Teledyne in 2006

Mensen

• Willard F. Rockwell · founder — Axle inventor (1888–1978) whose companies grew into Rockwell International
• Willard Rockwell Jr. · chief executive — Steered the group into aerospace; stepped down in 1979
• Robert Anderson · chief executive, 1979–1988 — Led Rockwell to become the largest US defence and NASA contractor
• Donald R. Beall · chief executive from 1988 — Shifted the company towards electronics and sold aerospace to Boeing

Records en primeurs

• B-1A reached Mach 2.22 in flight test
• Built all six Space Shuttle orbiters
• Largest US defence contractor and largest NASA contractor in the 1980s