Alice Lee still remembers the day four years ago when she was handed her pink slip, like so many fellow engineers working at McDonnell Douglas Corp.’s space division.

But being another statistic during the devastating period of aerospace downsizing actually turned out to be a good thing for Lee. Soon after being laid off, she struck out on her own and started a company, Night Technologies Inc.

“Your most valuable commodity might be yourself,” said Lee, whose four-person office in Los Angeles helps develop technology used to monitor traffic flow and road conditions. “A lot of us have to start out small and grow it’s all a reaction to downsizing in defense.”

Lee isn’t alone. One-time aerospace workers are widely considered an important talent pool for Southern California technology companies, especially those involved in software and the Internet.

Their success in finding new employment is a critical element in L.A.’s recovery from the loss of 140,000-plus aerospace-related jobs.

With defense buildups a thing of the past certainly in the way they dominated the state’s economy in the 1970s and 80s many former defense workers are starting their own businesses. Their search for new, more commercial ways to use their skills is a major part of the reason L.A. has emerged as a hotbed of high-tech activity.

The West San Fernando Valley and the Conejo Valley, in particular, have become a breeding ground for dozens of small, upstart high-tech companies capitalizing on the growth of telecommunications and the Internet.

A heavy concentration of former aerospace engineers has helped create the 20-mile communications corridor that straddles the Ventura Freeway (101).

The high-tech push has grown out of the “tens of thousands of engineers in Southern California writing software for 30 years,” said Jim Cole, general partner at venture capital firm Spectra Enterprise Associates in Westlake Village.

For decades, aerospace companies “took kids out of school and put them to work developing solutions to complex problems,” said Cole. “Now, we have people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who have years of experience finding solutions, and they’re applying them to multimedia PCs and networking for the Internet, and how to deliver high-speed video and how to deliver voice to the desktop.”

Between 1984 and 1994, an estimated 350,000 aerospace jobs were eliminated in California, according to a study released by the Rand Corp. last year. Of those workers, an estimated 15 percent or more became self-employed, according to the study.

The Santa Monica-based think tank did not track L.A.’s aerospace engineers-turned-entrepreneurs. But Rand analyst Robert F. Schoeni says there is a trend of workers moving from aerospace to technology.

“That’s where a lot of the engineers went,” he said. “We don’t have numbers to back this up, but we do have tons of anecdotal information. It was a logical step for these engineers.”

One example is Lou Tomasetta, a former Rockwell International Corp. engineer, who launched Vitesse Semiconductor in Camarillo just before local aerospace companies initiated mass layoffs.

Realizing that defense cutbacks were imminent, Tomasetta decided to go commercial.

“My decision was that we (at Rockwell) developed a lot of technology at the time, but they weren’t commercializing it the time was right to go on my own,” he said. “Certainly, Southern California had a big base of talented people, and I know that a lot of new high-tech companies can trace some of their roots from aerospace.”

Vitesse is publicly traded and now has 400 employees, he said. The company builds high-speed integrated circuits used mostly in telecommunications applications.

At La Mirada-based National Engineering Technology, a majority of the firm’s 70 engineers are former aerospace employees. Most of them were laid off in the late 1980s or early 1990s as government contracts dried up.

National Engineering quickly put them to use. During the earthquake, the company was handed a contract through the California Department of Transportation using satellites to monitor how damaged bridges impacted traffic flow.

“Without the aerospace engineers, we may never have thought about using satellites,” said Sean Wong, manager of the company’s Western regional office. “After all, these guys were sending missiles up into space. They know things above and beyond what a normal civil engineer would know.”