Downey highlight
Aerospace history
A center of American aerospace engineering from the 1940s through 1990s, where spacecraft for the Apollo program and Space Shuttle were built.
Downey became a hub of American aerospace during World War II when Vultee Aircraft manufactured military planes there in the 1940s and early 1950s. North American Aviation (NAA) then built aircraft at its Lakewood Boulevard facility, where engineers and workers assembled the Apollo command modules—the spacecraft that carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon and back in 1969. At the same time, between 1948 and 1955, Downey was also home to a U.S. Department of Energy nuclear research facility that built and operated California's first nuclear reactor, operational starting April 21, 1952.
After NAA merged to form Rockwell International in 1967, Downey remained the center of the company's Space Shuttle program, where engineers and manufacturers assembled five complete orbiters including Columbia and Challenger. For more than three decades, the Lakewood Boulevard facilities represented the cutting edge of human spaceflight, employing thousands of engineers, technicians and production workers whose skills made the shuttle program possible. When Rockwell's aerospace operations closed in 1999 after 70 years in Downey, it marked the end of an era that had defined the city's identity and economic strength.
Downey's aerospace legacy speaks to what multigenerational careers can build: stable employment that sustained families and allowed them to invest in homes and futures. Today's workers still need that same security—income protection that holds steady through the working years. A term life policy that covers the time until children are independent or a mortgage is paid protects the same stability that aerospace workers built for their families generations ago.