The nation celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing this month, Seventy-nine-year-old Al Ybarra has special pride in that mission. He and his fellow UAW members at Local 887 built the rocket engines that propelled the ship to the moon and back and constructed the module compartment where the pilots sat. Ybarra started working on research and development of the ship’s F1 and J2 engines in 1961 at Rocketdyne when he hired into North American Rockwell in California. Eventually, Rockwell’s other divisions, along with Rocketdyne, finished testing and constructing the five F1’s, five J2’s, one module engine ...
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