More than 100 protestors, including some of the region’s aerospace engineers, contacted the city, demanding the rocket ship be returned. The park was even featured in an issue of Life magazine in March 1963.īut in the early 1990s, as the city was reviewing its playground equipment in each of its many parks, the metal rocket ship was targeted as a safety concern. Torrance, an area with a long history in the aerospace industry, was a perfect setting for both the rocket ship and the park’s other major feature, a metal replica of a lunar module. The rocket ship was installed during the height of the Space Race, following the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik. The Rocketship Park opens to a stunning vista of the city. “Kids feel like they’re blasting off into space,” says Janet Payne, a vice president with Torrance Historical Society. On any given day for the last five decades, park visitors would see children scaling the ladder inside the ship from one level to the next and careening down the metal slide on the outside of the structure. The highlight of the 6.3-acre park, completed in the 1960s, has long been the 28-foot-tall rocket ship play structure, purchased from a catalog of playground equipment shortly after a local developer donated the land for the park to the city. The Rocketship Park in Torrance, California.įor generations of children who have grown up in Torrance, Calif., traveling to outer space was as easy as visiting Los Arboles “Rocketship” Park.
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