Kearny Mesa was an undeveloped northern fringe of San Diego when an integrated aerospace campus and rocket production site was built there by Convair Astronautics, a division of General Dynamics, in 1955. Convair had a major aircraft and weapons plant next to Lindbergh Field, San Diego’s main airport. But when it was hired to build the nation’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, the Atlas, it needed a more remote location, and the city offered the mesa land, seven miles north of downtown. The modernist architect William Pereira was hired to design the complex, which would be the first of several aerospace campuses he would design in Southern California. Kearny Mesa had two office towers, a cavernous open lobby, laboratories, cafeterias, and manufacturing halls, totaling more than a million square feet. The plant was torn down in the mid-1990s, and redeveloped into an office park. Northrop Grumman has a few buildings at what was the center of the plant, across from the corporate headquarters for Jack in the Box.