Hidden in Plain Sight: What is the Super Guppy and why is there a NASA station in El Paso?
Photos by
The Apollo moon missions owe part of their success to NASA’s remarkable Super Guppy. Its hinged nose swings open 110 degrees, creating a cavernous front that made loading enormous, mission‑critical equipment fast and surprisingly effortless.
Dave Beltran, one of the four mechanics that work on the Super Guppy started in January 2020. He attended school in San Antonio and started his aviation career at Boeing Aerospace as a tank diver. “I used to go inside fuel tanks,” Beltran says. He then went on to work on KC-135s and then jumped to C-17s, KC-10s and C-130s. “I worked at the airport in San Antonio where I started working on different aircraft like MD-11s and Sea Airbus,” Beltran says. His main expertise now is sheet metal, which brought him to working on the Super Guppy.
“It’s a bunch of planes put together so it’s really hard to work on a plane like this. It’s like a Frankenstein,” Beltran says excitedly. All four mechanics fly with the Super Guppy wherever the Super Guppy goes…