Strange Angel (27 page)

Just as ominous were the possible repercussions from Parsons' recreational activities. One morning in November 1941, Malina received a phone call telling him that a GALCIT night watchman was in jail. His name was Paul Seckler, and along with his wife Phyllis he was a resident of Winona Boulevard and a member of the OTO (Parsons had gotten him the watchman job). The previous night Seckler had gone to Parsons' house for one of his twice weekly meetings. Ed Forman had also been there. But something had happened on this night that had deeply affected Seckler. Malina thought a'séance might have taken place. More likely, drink, drugs, and perhaps a magick ritual were involved. All that is certain is that Seckler, who was known in the OTO to suffer from fits of drunken violence, ran out of Parsons' house, half-crazed, clutching a pistol belonging to Parsons. He found a car parked on a nearby street in which a young couple was engaged in a romantic entanglement and forced the pair out at gunpoint. He then took the car and drove around Hollywood for a few hours. Calmed somewhat by his flight, he drove back to Pasadena in the early hours of the morning and found the police waiting for him at the Colorado Street Bridge.

Malina was shocked. With the tightened security procedures at the rocket project, secrecy was paramount. Now here was one of his staff getting arrested for hijacking a car! Malina immediately drove to the jail to talk to the chief of police, who agreed to keep the story out of the newspapers. However, when he spoke to Seckler, Seckler was “very vague” and refused to talk about the incident. When Malina then called on Parsons and Forman, they, too, wouldn't say a word. The incident signaled a loosening of the close bonds that had tied Malina and Parsons together. The Suicide Squad was growing rapidly, and each rocketeer had become involved not only in his own scientific problems but also in his own social world. Malina recalled, “Our relationship had become much more tenuous, so I didn't really know all that was going on.” Seckler was sent to San Quentin State Prison for two years, leaving Malina to wonder whether Parsons' extracurricular enthusiasms might be getting out of hand.

 

On December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor was bombed, prompting the United States' formal declaration of war on Japan. America's industrial assembly lines began working around the clock in the rush to war. Typewriter factories began making machine guns; Chrysler started building tanks. Scientists, military officers, economists, executives, and public officials were all brought together to pool their talents in order to find solutions to urgent wartime problems. The result was an economic boom which the United States somewhat guiltily, embraced. The country's pre-Wall Street crash confidence had returned.

Exempted from the draft because of their military work, the rocketeers now knew they must focus all of their attention on getting results and getting them quickly. Finding a stable liquid fuel was now their main focus, for liquid fuels were more powerful than solid fuels and in addition they could be turned on and off at will by regulating the flow of fuel into the rocket motor. Once you lit a canister of solid fuel, its combustion could not be stopped. However, as the Suicide Squad's first explosive experiments in 1936 had proved, developing liquid fuels was no simple proposition. None of them currently known could be stored safely, especially not in the rough wartime conditions that the navy had stipulated.

Martin Summerfield had been working on the liquid side, following Parsons' experimental lead, testing several combinations which used gasoline as a fuel and red fuming nitric acid (RFNA) as the oxidizer. His trials, conducted at freshly dug test pits in the Arroyo, had met with predictably varied results. The first two motors had both failed unspectacularly. When the third motor was tested, it exploded with such ferocity that it set fire to the sides of the test shack. The clamps holding the motor in place were bent out of shape, gauges broke, and the rocketeers were sent scrambling for cover as the wall of sheet metal protecting them buckled.

After the flames had been doused, Parsons and Summerfield conducted a postmortem on the battered and burst apparatus. They concluded that the main cause of the explosion was a throbbing action in the motor. Once the fuel had been ignited, the motor sporadically began to pulse, its sides expanding and contracting while the thrust fluctuated wildly. The throbbing was slight at first but increased in intensity until at the fourth or fifth pulsation the motor blew up. They thought the gasoline fuel was the cause of the throbbing, and they tried differing amounts of fuel and oxidizer and different pressures in the chamber to no avail. They grew all the more concerned when, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the army informed them that it expected to view flight tests of the liquid-fueled motors in the spring of 1942. This time the test plane was to be no lightweight Ercoupe but a 14,000-pound Douglas bimotor bomber, the A-20A. It was time for Malina to come up with a solution.

During a visit to the Naval Engineering Department Station at Annapolis, Maryland, in February 1942, Malina learned of a liquid named aniline. It was a hypergolic chemical, meaning that it ignited spontaneously when added to the nitric acid the rocketeers were using as an oxidizer, and Malina initially thought it could replace the troublesome ignition mechanism they had been working on. Going one step further, however, he telegrammed Summerfield and told him to get rid of gasoline altogether and replace it with aniline. By the time he returned to Pasadena, the rocketeers' motor was running smoothly; all throbbing had been eliminated; and the new fuel's unique property of spontaneous ignition had allowed the group to dispense with the ignition system, greatly simplifying the motor's design. Of course, aniline had its own share of problems. It was highly toxic and could rather worryingly be absorbed through the skin. When tests took place, prevailing breezes were checked and the immediate vicinity was evacuated. Nevertheless, with the test date approaching, this new fuel was a godsend. The rockets fired with an awesome, controlled power. Malina wrote an ecstatic letter home: “We now have something that really works and we should be able to help give the Fascists hell!”

The first liquid JATO tests were held at Muroc Auxiliary Air Field in the heart of the Mojave Desert, across the mountains from March Field. This unforgiving landscape contained no traces of civilization. The air field is situated on the eastern shore of Muroc Dry Lake, a barren, hard-packed playa—a perfectly flat and saucerlike depression that was already being used for automobile speed tests and as a bombing range. On April 15, 1942, the team laid out a stripe three feet wide and twelve thousand feet long on the lake bed as a guide for the pilot, Major Paul Dane, another of Kármán's former students. In contrast with the mood at the Ercoupe tests, spirits were high. Parsons was still concerned with his solid-fuel rockets, and he only made the one visit to Muroc, missing many of the actual test flights. Nevertheless, his playfulness seemed to have infected the entire group's preparations. Even the most senior members of the squad were not immune to the pranks and slipups which so often seemed to accompany the rocketeers' experiments.

When a navy observer flew to Muroc in the latest state-of-the-art fighter plane, he asked Kármán, who was also paying a visit to the test field, if he would like to view it. The rocketeers wondered aloud whether this was a wise thing to do—Kármán had an uncanny knack for wreaking havoc on experimental equipment. Laboratory apparatus would often lie in ruins following Kármán's enthusiastic prods and pokes. Paying no heed to these warnings, the pilot motioned for Kármán to climb into the cockpit and began to explain the array of dials and switches in front of him as the diminutive Hungarian gazed on excitedly. Suddenly Kármán pointed to a handle by his foot and, asking what it was for, gave it a sharp pull. The navy pilot's horrified cry, “No!” was drowned out by a large crash behind the wing. The rocketeers scurried away from the airplane, expecting an immediate detonation. Instead, two giant balloons began to inflate under each wing; Kármán had released the water flotation gear. He swiveled in his seat delightedly watching the balloons expand, while the Navy observer clutched his head in despair. “My Lord,” he gasped. “How will I explain this at my base—flotation gear activated in the desert!” The rocketeers allowed themselves a knowing smirk.

The hulking A-20A bomber that the group planned to use for their test had already been fitted with two liquid-fuel thrust rockets. With the fuel and oxidizer tanks built into the wings, each motor was capable of delivering a thousand pounds of thrust for twenty-five seconds. They were fired by Beverly “Bud” Forman, a cousin of Ed Forman's, sitting in the tail gunner's seat.

After several static tests, it was time to attempt a rocket-powered takeoff. The engines were revved up and the cumbersome black bomber lumbered down the runway. When the rockets ignited, the plane leapt forward, starting like a bull to which a white hot brand had been applied. Inside the plane, Dane and Forman could feel the heat of the boosters on their faces, clean through the aluminum of the plane's body. In a cloud of swirling acrid smoke, the plane charged into the air. The team recorded the point of take-off and made a series of quick calculations. The two liquid-propellant rockets had chopped one-third off the propeller plane's normal takeoff time and distance. The rocketeers on the ground cheered as Dane indulged in some acrobatic celebration.

The JATOs had worked. After years of trial-and-error experimentation and painstakingly thought-out theory, the team had reached their goal. Just a few weeks later, the squad had signed their first production contract, agreeing to sell sixty Jet-Assisted Take-Off engines to the army air corps. The Suicide Squad, now officially GALCIT Project Number One, had invented a product that was unique, successful, and, more importantly, marketable. It wasn't time to sell out, but it was certainly time to cash in.

 

Man cannot live on gunpowder, smoke, and adrenalin alone. After years of privation and nonstop work, the founding members of the Suicide Squad felt that it was time to reap the benefits of their achievements. Indeed, for Parsons and Forman, still unaffiliated to any institution of learning, even the recent successes did not entirely ease their anxiety. If the JATO projects were cancelled, they would be unceremoniously returned to the same place they had been in 1936, mixing explosives for powder companies in the desert. They made their displeasure known and Malina for once agreed. “I shared the opinions of Parsons and Forman that after the efforts we had made during the previous five years we should participate in the exploitation of our ideas.”

Even before the liquid-fuel rockets were tested, Malina had approached Kármán with the idea of forming a company to produce the solid fuel JATOs that the rocketeers had invented and sell them to the army. Such a project would not be easy. Despite the commercial uses made of the wind tunnel, Caltech was primarily an institution for education and research, and the administration had made it clear that while it now condoned the research work being done by the GALCIT group, it had neither the time nor the inclination to immerse itself in large-scale engineering development and production. Old man Robert Millikan, still the president and moral center of Caltech, lowered his eyebrows and shook his head at the idea of Kármán and Malina—supposedly men of pure science—turning their attention toward that dread brother of learning, industry. Millikan's concerns were ironic, considering the close ties the coming war would foster between industry and science, but it was not just academia that disapproved. Further objections were raised by General “Hap” Arnold of the army air corps, who returned Robert Millikan's compliment by saying that he would never trust an academic institution to go into manufacturing in any case.

In order to avoid angering either of the rocketeers' main benefactors, Kármán suggested that it might be best to approach an existing aeronautical company about producing JATOs. The rocketeers could then lend their expertise to the work and participate in the profit sharing, without upsetting Caltech or worrying the military. He contacted all the aircraft firms in Los Angeles to see which would like to share in their endeavour and set up a rocket engine division making JATOs. Since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, all six of the large aviation firms located in the Los Angeles area—Douglas, Lockheed, Vega, Northrop, North American, Convair—had accelerated into a triple-shift, around-the-clock schedule. President Roosevelt had called for the construction of 60,000 planes a year—more than had been manufactured in the United States since the invention of flight—and the air companies now employed a workforce of over 100,000 people, up from 13,000 in 1939. Even Parsons' mother Ruth was now working six days a week at Lockheed in order to support herself. But despite the industry boom, Kármán's high standing within the aeronautical world, and the successes of the Ercoupe and A-20A tests, not one company would take Kármán up on his offer. Outside of Caltech the stigma of rocket propulsion was still strong, despite the army's interest, and was shared by the pinstripe as much as the gown. The group would have to go it alone once more.

Well, not quite alone. Old man Millikan and General Arnold had a point Kármán could see all too well: Scientists rarely make good businessmen. It is little surprise that Frank Malina, the only member of the Suicide Squad to make a significant amount of money in his later years, did so partly by accident. Realizing his own inadequacies, Kármán contacted Andrew G. Haley, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who had helped Kármán's sister get a visa earlier that year. Haley was a Falstaffian figure, a rotund businessman known for his ability to get what he wanted, maintaining all the while a mischievous Irish sense of humor. He had developed a great respect for Kármán in their dealings up until now, and the two men shared a natural, unfeigned exuberance. Haley seemed the ideal man to help the rocketeers in their cause. As well as knowing how Washington worked—he had specialized in communications law and had written many of the regulations governing the radio business in the late 1930s—he was also a man touched by romantic enthusiasms. A lover of poetry, songs, and bonhomie, he was more than willing to believe in the dream of rockets. He agreed to help the group form a company that would produce JATOs for the armed forces.