Lompoc Ca

Joe Martin grew up in the 1940s in a segregated East Texas town where blacks attended black schools, ate in black restaurants and rode in the back of the bus. Forty years later, Martin is facing a different kind of prejudice. Although the Lompoc Elks Lodge lets him in the door to attend community functions, they won't let him join. Because he is black, a number of members said, his application was recently rejected.

Palmdale won a lobbying war Wednesday for the right to build a $2.1-billion replacement for the space shuttle Challenger, as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided it would cost too much and take too long to build the spacecraft at Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc. NASA said Rockwell International estimated it would cost nearly $150 million more to do the work at Vandenberg than at Palmdale, where the company built the previous four shuttle orbiters.

The usually quiescent California cities of Lompoc and Palmdale are flexing their political muscles in Washington this week in a pork barrel competition to host the assembly site for the space shuttle orbiter to replace the lost Challenger. NASA has always built space shuttles in Palmdale, but the Air Force has recently suggested that its $3.5-billion spaceport at Vandenberg Air Force Base, which has become something of a white elephant in the last year, be used as the assembly site.