* Illustration: Evah Fan * Let's say you're trying to build your own rocket, and the budget gets tight — maybe you fail to win an X Prize, or the dotcom mogul you had in your back pocket suddenly gets bored and takes up yacht racing. Where can you go for those pricey liquid oxygen valves and titanium fuel tanks? Norton Sales. It's easy to find — it's the place with the bomb canisters and missile components in the window. Since the 1960s, Norton has been the premier US dealer of secondhand spaceship parts. The salvage company, located in scruffy North Hollywood, does 70 percent of its business with aerospace companies — both established firms and the new crop of private space ventures, like Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites and Elon Musk's SpaceX.

On a recent visit, I met owner Carlos Guzman, a solidly built 41-year-old with close-cropped, reddish hair and a goatee, wearing jeans and a company T-shirt. From the front of the shop, he guided me through a morass of pipe fittings, motors, compressors, disconnected beer taps, and a plastic alien head to a 6-foot-high knot of ducts, pipes, and corrugated metal. It's one of Guzman's favorite items — a duplicate of the engine that blasted 10 Apollo missions into space. "Besides being cool, it's very historical," he observes.

The bulk of the Norton collection sits in the warehouse and adjacent outdoor junkyard. Row after row of shelves strain under masses of metal parts of all sizes and shapes and unguessable utility — some dusty, some grimy, some shiny-new. "Sometimes we just don't know where to put everything," Guzman says. An 8-foot prototype engine designed for a Saturn IV rocket squats in a corner, looking like the robot from Lost in Space turned inside out. A Thiokol solid-state rocket engine sits in the blazing sun. Guzman figures it cost at least $10 million to build; he'll sell it to you for $50,000.

Very little of Guzman's inventory will actually get to space. He sells a lot of high-grade hydraulics to lowriders and other car obsessives, does a brisk prop business with movie and TV studios, and adapts gadgets for special effects. And, of course, he serves those new space companies. He estimates his sales at about $50,000 a month.

Having begun his career as a plumber, Guzman became interested in hydraulics and pneumatics. That led to a job at a small aerospace firm that bought parts from a family business run by retired restaurateur Norton Holstrom, who had started picking up and flipping the cast-offs of Southern California's then-booming aerospace industry. Guzman loved Holstrom's place, and when a position opened up, he went to work for Holstrom's son. Eventually, he bought the business.

With the Holstrom family out, the Guzmans are in. Carlos' 15-year-old son, Roman, works afternoons, stocking shelves and cleaning up. How does the teen feel, surrounded by the machinery that has helped lift humanity to the stars? Guzman laughs. "He's bored out of his mind."

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