Masters: Since Endeavor's dramatic arrival in Los Angeles in 2012, it's become an iconic symbol of the region's aerospace history, drawing millions of visitors to the California Science Center, but just a few miles away, another Shuttle, almost forgotten, lies dismembered under plastic tarps in a municipal maintenance yard, hidden in plain sight.

So this is it right here?

Man: This is it.

This is the Shuttle.

Masters: Ben Dickow directs the Columbia Memorial Space Center, and he sees this mockup as more than a relic.

Once the space center's expansion is complete, the mockup will rise again, reassembled for permanent exhibition.

Dickow: This is the very first Space Shuttle ever built.

It's the full-scale, 1-to-1 mockup of the Shuttle.

It was built as an engineering tool to figure out how do you build a Space Shuttle because there was no CAD or anything like that.

Masters: Ha ha!

Right.

You just had to build it.

Dickow: You had to build it and then figure out how things fit, and this was built in 1972.

Masters: So this mockup obviously never went into space.

Dickow: No.

Masters: It was built to show what the Space Shuttle could be like.

It was a sort of a concept, but then it also had use after the Shuttle program was approved.

Dickow: Oh, absolutely.

So as the Shuttle program got off the ground and engineers were trying to figure out how to fit things in here, right, they'd come here, and they would use this as the actual model to try to fit little pieces and parts and everything.

This had hydraulic lines and electrical lines and everything sort of mapped out in here.

Masters: So it wasn't just a model to get the Shuttle approved.

It was also a faithful replica.

Dickow: Absolutely.

Masters: And whenever they made a change to the to the actual Shuttles that flew-- Dickow: They would make it here and then make the change.

Yeah.

No, this was a tool.

This was absolutely an engineering scientific tool.

Masters: At Edwards Air Force Base... Dickow: Yeah.

Masters: There was a lot of testing on the Shuttle done there.

The Enterprise drops.

Dickow: Absolutely.

Masters: And of course, I mean, even the first landing was, in one sense, a test, but all that testing only happened after just a ton more testing here in Downey.

Dickow: Totally.

When you think about the first flight of Columbia was in April of 1981.

They had just gotten the contract basically 10 years before, so in all of that time, all that stuff had to be tested out.

Masters: I've seen some photos of work being done at the Rockwell plant, and I have to say that that the photos are remarkable in that the workforce was pretty diverse.

Dickow: Picture a NASA engineer from especially 50 years ago, right?

Shortsleeve, white shirt, white guy with a crew cut, right, and a pocket protector.

Masters: Pocket protector.

Dickow: Exactly.

Exactly, exactly, and there were certainly some of them there, but that was not the vast majority of the workforce.

It was super diverse.

That reflected the multicultural sort of Southern California atmosphere.

A lot of people are coming from other parts of the country here to work on this site and on this program, and the engineering workforce wasn't even the major workforce here.

This was mostly blue-collar, highly skilled technicians who could bend metal, who knew how to solder really well and all that kind of stuff.

They're just as important in this story as the theorists or anybody doing the slide rules and the calculators.

Masters: So the safety of the astronauts, their very lives depended on the work that the engineer and the craftsmen and all the blue-collar workers did here.

Dickow: Absolutely.

Kind of going a little bit farther back, the Apollo 1 story is kind of interesting here because when that disaster happened in Florida, there were Downey crew there, and then Downey got the first phone call because we're the manufacturer.

Who do you call if you have to get something repaired, right?

You look in your owner's manual, and you see who built it and you say, "Hey.

What happened?"

That's exactly what happened here.

So the responsibility of this site and the people on this site was pretty big.

Masters: Let's go take a look.

Dickow: Yeah, sure.

Let's do it.

So this is, like, where all the wiring, all the utility and stuff like that is.

This is the floor of the mid-deck.

This is where they were sleeping, toilet, all that kind of stuff.

Right above that is the flight deck with the pilot seat, the remote arm manipulator going that way.

Masters: Wow!

There's actually a lot more space in here than I would have imagined.

Pretty cool.

Dickow: Heh heh.