Strange Angel (11 page)

Hale may have started the process, but the bulk of the credit for amassing this vast array of talent goes to Millikan, who swiftly became the doge of the institute. Albert Einstein noted that as chairman of Caltech's executive committee, Millikan presided over his faculty like a god. Never one to court popularity, Millikan became a favorite nemesis of the student body. Beneath a giant piece of religious graffiti that read, “Jesus Saves,” one wit had written, “...but Millikan gets credit.” Nevertheless, in 1930 he pulled off one of the greatest coups of his long and illustrious career by tempting the presiding genius of the twentieth century to become a visiting fellow at the university.

As paterfamilias to the new scientific race, Albert Einstein was the final addition to Caltech's roll of honor. One of the reasons Einstein came west was the warm winters, like the many other immigrants swarming into California each week. But, more importantly, he was interested in the news that Caltech's Edwin Hubble had seen, through the telescope on Mount Wilson, distant galaxies streaking away from earth at the speed of light. Here was proof that the universe was expanding, an observation that directly refuted Einstein's view of the universe as a fixed and constant sphere. Intrigued, he and his wife traveled west to see the evidence. Thus for three winters in the early 1930s, Einstein could be found happily riding his bicycle through the campus of Caltech. The addition of this latest and brightest star to the increasingly spectacular constellation of scientific greats in Pasadena meant that Caltech's future was assured.

In 1935, the twenty-year-old Jack Parsons and the twenty-two-year-old Ed Forman wandered into this enclave of scientific brilliance. They had been attracted to Caltech by a newspaper article that had appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
on March 28, 1935. Among headlines speaking of a giant dust storm stretching across New Mexico and Texas and of ominous anti-Lithuanian demonstrations in Germany, one headline seemed to speak directly to them:
ROCKET PLANE VISUALIZED FLYING
1200
MILES HOUR
. A graduate student in aeronautics (the study of motion in air) named William Bollay had presented a paper at Caltech on the recent work of a member of the amateur Austrian Society for Rocket Technology, Eugen Sänger. Sänger, who had conducted most of his work apart from the scientific establishment and without any outside funding, spoke in strongly optimistic terms about the possibility of rockets being used to power aircraft. What the newspapers were most excited about was the mention of maximum velocities and breaching of the stratosphere.

The fastest a propeller-driven aircraft was able to fly at this point was 440 miles per hour. For Parsons, currently locked in stalemate with his own experiments, Bollay's theoretical paper came as a sign from the scientific heavens. Parsons was by no means awed by Caltech's reputation. He had, after all, been taught by the institute's graduate students while at the adjacent University School. To those living in the small city of Pasadena, Caltech felt as much a public institution as the city library. Thus, on the very day they read about the lecture, Parsons and Forman strode onto the Caltech campus to find Bollay.

When they finally found his study, they discovered that Bollay was busy on research unrelated to rockets and had no time to help them in their enquiries. But whether because of their earnestness or their considerable and rare breadth of knowledge on the subject, he did not dismiss them out of hand. Instead he directed them to a graduate student named Frank Malina who had similarly mentioned his own interest in rockets to Bollay. It was to be the most serendipitous meeting of Parsons' professional life.

Frank Malina was twenty-two years old, a thin, soft-spoken man, serious and intelligent. He had attended Bollay's lecture the previous day and it had excited him just as it had Parsons. Malina had been born in Brenham, Texas, the son of Czech immigrants. Both his parents were professional musicians and Malina soon developed into a skilled piano and trumpet player. When he was seven years old Malina's family moved back to Czechoslovakia and Malina became increasingly interested in balloons and aircraft, swiftly progressing to rockets upon reading Jules Verne's
From the Earth to the Moon
(apparently the urtext of rocketry). When he returned to Texas five years later, Malina decided he would forgo the musical career his parents had expected of him and instead become an engineer. At the age of seventeen he enrolled at Texas A&M to study mechanical engineering and while he still played music to pay for his expenses—becoming the college's bugler in the process—it was outer space that consistently occupied his mind. In his last year at college he wrote an essay on interplanetary spaceflight filled with the thoughtful speculation of the space enthusiast.

 

Now that man has conquered travel through the air his imagination has turned to interplanetary travel. Many prominent scientists of today say that travel through space to the Moon or to Mars is impossible. Others say “What man can imagine, he can do.”

 

The paper was infused with a spirit of human endeavor, with a belief in science's ability to better mankind. It was characteristic of Malina's scientific approach—humanitarian and levelheaded.

When Parsons and Forman approached him, his feelings on rocketry had been dampened by more prosaic academic work. But he recognized an opportunity in their query. Following an endowment by the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, Caltech had gained an aeronautical laboratory on campus. Known as the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT), it had a wind tunnel in which Malina was working. The tunnel, ten feet in diameter, lay at the center of the GALCIT building. Offices, laboratories, and classrooms were distributed haphazardly around the tunnel as if it were a magnet to which study had been irresistibly drawn. The reason for its attraction was the tunnel's ability to generate wind speeds of up to 200 miles per hour, in which scale models of newly designed aircraft could be tested for lift, drag, and stability. All the aviation companies of the West Coast used it, as did many others from further afield, each paying $200 per hour for the privilege. Since it was also used for GALCIT's own research projects, the tunnel was always busy. For Malina, long hours spent observing models in the tunnel had only demonstrated the limitations of propeller-powered airplanes. While employment in the tunnel had its benefits—on hot days he could lie on his back and smoke cigarettes as a cool breeze played over him—his wages, which stood at a trifling 25 cents an hour, heightened his frustration with the other shortcomings of his work.

A shared dream can unite even the most disparate characters. When Parsons and Malina met, their enthusiasm for rocketry and space travel bonded them like a Masonic handshake. They also shared an intellectual affinity. Malina, the skilled musician and artist, and the well-read and cultured Parsons soon found they shared many other interests. They were both interested in classical music and politics and, because of their respective travels in Europe, were concerned with the rise of Fascism there. They even shared the same birthday. As for the difference between their scientific educations, this was somewhat beside the point: Rocketry was not even acknowledged in any formal science courses. The topic of academic credentials was never discussed. “It seems to me that at most he had finished high school,” remembered Malina. “When I met him he already had a certain amount of experience with the manufacture of explosives ... but I think what was outstanding about him was that he was not of any fixed view on which way to go ... He had a very flexible sort of attitude.” With Forman they formed a complementary triumvirate: Parsons would act as the chemist, Malina the mathematician, and Forman the engineer. All were aware of Robert Goddard's martyrdom at the hands of the establishment and of the general scorn in which rocketry was held by the American academic elite. Surrounded by the greatest scientific minds of the time, Parsons, Forman, and Malina must have felt, conversely, as if they had fallen in amidst the barbarian hordes.

However, if their study of rocketry was to stretch beyond enthusiasts' banter, the blessing of Caltech was needed. Here was a treasure trove of chemicals, tools, and engineering know-how. If they could persuade the university authorities to allow them to use the facilities, and perhaps to give them some funding as well, their work—to study, create, and fly rockets—could begin in earnest.

As they began putting together a proposal, the three recognized the need to avoid being tainted by the “moon-rocket” tag that had plagued Goddard so cruelly. Even the American Interplanetary Society had bowed to the derision that talk of space travel caused and had changed its name to the more modest American Rocket Society (ARS). In shooting for the stars, they would first have to lower their gaze.

Parsons and Forman came up with a moderate description of their aims for the Caltech authorities: “The design of a high-altitude sounding rocket propelled by either a solid or liquid propellant rocket engine.” Their proposal did not sound outlandish. They planned to build a research rocket that could carry meteorological instruments or a camera into the ionosphere, twenty-five miles up, and then return to earth by parachute, with information on the atmosphere. The fact that it would be able to travel higher than balloons might even tempt the meteorological department of Caltech to take a financial interest in it. But they all knew that no known rocket technology had come even close to achieving such heights. There had been much theorizing about the possibility of 1,200-miles-per-hour rocket planes, but no actual experiments, even among the VfR, had approached these goals. There had been successes: The VfR had gotten one of their rockets to fly to the height of one kilometer in the early 1930s. Although cloaked in secrecy, the Russian rocket societies had also attained heights of a few hundred meters. The British Interplanetary Society was not so lucky. The Explosives Act of 1875 forbade them from any actual experiments with explosives. However, in the United States the auspices weren't much more promising. The great Robert Goddard had only managed to get his liquid-fuelled rockets to soar to a height of ninety feet before his exile.

Malina, preferring to put theory before experimentation, suggested that the three make an even less ambitious proposal. Nothing could be allowed to conjure up the bugbear of serious science—sensationalism. He suggested a two-part program: theoretical studies on the thermodynamics and flight performance of a rocket, then the creation of a working rocket motor (the chamber in which the fuel combusts). Malina argued that they should not start their project by designing a whole rocket as Parsons had wanted, complete with a space-age shell, launching tower, parachute, and the like. Malina also suggested that only static tests should take place. In a static test the rocket motor is inverted on a stand. With the exhaust nozzle aimed skyward, thrust can be measured by the push of the motor on pressure gauges. The rocket wouldn't move much, but it could be examined easily. Until the three of them fully explained to Caltech and to themselves the intricacies of how a rocket functioned, Malina said the extent of their initial plan should be “a series of theoretical studies which address the thermodynamic problems of the reaction principles and the flight performance requirements of a sounding rocket.” It was back to basics for all of them.

Parsons and Forman were shocked by the austerity of Malina's plan. They had wanted to continue their own experiments at Caltech, not begin the whole project again. The very idea of static tests seemed contrary to the work they had been pursuing for the last eight years of their lives; the damn motor wasn't even pointing in the right direction! An addiction to a rocket's blastoff and the subsequent compulsion to build a bigger and better rocket were endemic among the early rocket enthusiasts. To spend months, possibly years, constructing a rocket motor that wasn't even going to get off the ground was the equivalent of giving milk and cookies to a junkie.

Arguments flared, Parsons and Forman threatened to leave, and the embryonic group teetered on the brink of dissolution. But they needed each other. Malina was Parsons' link to Caltech and scientific respectability, not to mention the institute's vast resources; Parsons in turn was Malina's connection to the scattered history of rocket experiments and a storehouse of valuable firsthand experience of constructing and testing rockets. Each served as the foil for the other: Malina trying to calm Parsons and introduce him to basic scientific method, Parsons spurring Malina on to experiment, experiment, experiment. The argument over the rocket proposal anticipated the creative, and destructive, tension that would characterize the men's relationship in the years to come—Parsons and Forman, the impetuous experimenters, versus Malina, the cautious theoretician.

Eventually, Parsons and Forman grudgingly downgraded their project to the construction of “a workable engine with a reasonable specific impulse” (“specific impulse” being the measure of a motor's efficiency in providing thrust to a rocket vehicle). It may have lacked the explosive payoff of the rocket launch, but this new project was by no means simple. To make a working rocket motor they had to thoroughly understand every part of it. The correct size of the combustion chamber needed to be ascertained: a larger chamber allows more fuel to be burned, making the rocket more powerful but also heavier, while a smaller chamber might be lighter—but could it produce enough thrust to lift itself? The best fuel mixture—solid or liquid—had to be decided upon; the liquid fuels were more powerful but more dangerous, while the solid fuels provided less thrust but were safer. The group would be forging ahead into largely unexplored territory. Malina would handle the mathematics side, using formulae to determine the pressure of a burning gas inside a rocket combustion chamber or the theoretical burn times for differing types of fuel, factors crucial to studying and improving the thrust. Parsons would provide the practical and chemical element, creating tailor-made explosives. By now he had a voluminous knowledge of chemistry. Forman would act as the chief mechanic, constructing and designing the metal motors in the workshop.