The Founding of JPL

Contents

1. A request to Theodore von Kármán
2. The Halloween test in the canyon
3. Army contracts and assisted takeoff
4. Why the name says jet propulsion
5. The WAC Corporal and what came after

Mike Kobeissi’s working life in the United States began at Ralph’s Grocery in La Cañada, the foothill town that holds the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The question most readers bring to the laboratory is how an institution that now sends spacecraft across the solar system came to start in a dry streambed at the foot of the mountains. The short answer is a student project, a patient professor and a run of risky motor tests that the Army later decided to pay for.

A request to Theodore von Kármán

In 1936 three young men walked into the Caltech office of the aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán with an unusual request, help in designing a rocket that could climb to high altitude, as the Smithsonian’s Air & Space magazine recounts.² Frank Malina was a graduate student who hoped to write his doctoral dissertation on rocket propulsion. Jack Parsons and Ed Forman were not enrolled; they were self taught chemists and rocketry enthusiasts who had gone to Malina for technical advice. After a few days of thought, von Kármán approved the plan, and the Caltech Rocket Research Project soon drew in other students working on solid and liquid propellants.²

Some members of the faculty grumbled about the danger of rocket work near the campus laboratories, and other students took to calling Malina’s circle the Suicide Squad. Von Kármán’s advice was to test as far from campus as possible. After some scouting the group chose a spot in the canyon of the Arroyo Seco, on the western outskirts of Pasadena, close to where the laboratory stands now.² The National Air and Space Museum counts the Pasadena group, formed in 1935 and 1936 under von Kármán, among the most important American rocket groups of its day.⁵

Figure

The 1936 test motor in numbers

Rocketeers named on the 1936 team

7

Height of the duralumin motor

Nearly 5 ft

Time spent building the motor

9 months

Attempt on which the motor started

4th

The Halloween test in the canyon

The first motor test took place on October 31, 1936, at a site that JPL’s own history series calls primitive by any standard: wooden test frames, exposed wiring and sandbag barriers on dusty chaparral, with no established facilities or formal procedures.¹ Space.com’s anniversary account names seven people on the team, most of them Caltech graduate students: Malina, Parsons, Forman, A. O. Smith, William Bollay, Carlos Wood and William Rockefeller. They had spent nine months on a motor nearly five feet tall, built of duralumin and wrapped in a water jacket to keep the combustion chamber cool.³

The nozzle pointed skyward, and the motor’s thrust was meant to push a diamond tipped arm across a clock driven glass drum, leaving a scratched record of the force. The crew sheltered behind sandbags while the fuse was lit. Nothing happened on the first attempt, nor on the second or third.³ Caltech Magazine quotes the JPL historian Erik Conway on what followed: on the fourth try the motor ignited, the oxygen line whipped loose, and everyone ran. The group still counted the day a success, partly because it exposed several mistakes worth never repeating.⁴

Figure

From student project to Army contractor

1. 01
   May 1938General Henry A. Arnold of the Army Air Corps visits, and an Air Corps contract for takeoff rockets follows
2. 02
   August 1941Rocket units lift an Ercoupe flown by Captain Homer Boushey, on the last run with no propeller
3. 03
   February 1942Aniline and red fuming nitric acid prove to ignite on contact, a storable propellant
4. 04
   March 1942The Aerojet Engineering Corporation is incorporated to sell takeoff units

Army contracts and assisted takeoff

By 1938 the project had produced solid results and several technical papers, including a theoretical study of rocket motor thermodynamics that Malina wrote with a fellow student. In May of that year General Henry A. Arnold, chief of the Army Air Corps, came to see the work. With war approaching he was interested in rocket units that could shorten takeoffs for heavily loaded warplanes, and a $10,000 Air Corps contract followed.²

The laboratory’s history adds that von Kármán persuaded the Army to fund these takeoff motors, and that the Army helped Caltech acquire land in the Arroyo Seco for test pits and temporary workshops as wartime demand grew.¹ In August 1941 the group’s solid fuel units pushed a light Ercoupe monoplane flown by Army Captain Homer Boushey; on the last run the propeller was removed, and six units under the wings lifted him briefly on rocket thrust alone. In February 1942 the team found that aniline fuel and red fuming nitric acid ignite on contact, which did away with a separate ignition system and gave rocketry a propellant that could be stored.²

Why the name says jet propulsion

In 1942 von Kármán, Malina and others founded Aerojet to build takeoff rockets in quantity, while the Caltech group itself became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.⁵ The name was chosen with care: the museum notes that it avoided the word rocket, which many people still associated with fantasy.⁵ The arrangement that grew from these years, a laboratory run by a university on federal money, is the subject of JPL and Caltech.

Figure

The WAC Corporal and its descendants

1. 01
   October 1945The first WAC Corporal flies at White Sands and reaches about 45 miles
2. 02
   Later versionsImproved WAC Corporals reach about 60 miles
3. 03
   Bumper WACA WAC Corporal on a V 2 becomes the first two stage liquid propellant rocket
4. 04
   AerobeeA larger Navy version; more than 1,000 flew from 1947 to 1985

The WAC Corporal and what came after

The laboratory’s best known early product for the Army, finished as the war closed, was a small liquid propellant rocket. The museum’s history of early military rockets records that the WAC Corporal used a solid booster to clear its launch tower, first flew at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico in October 1945 and reached about 45 miles, while improved versions climbed to 60 miles. It was a sounding rocket, carrying instruments on short suborbital flights. Stacked on a captured V 2 as its lower stage, it became the Bumper WAC, the first two stage liquid propellant rocket.⁶ The Navy built a larger relative, the Aerobee, and more than a thousand of those flew between 1947 and 1985, while the Army’s Corporal missile went into production in the early 1950s.⁶

Looking back, the laboratory’s history series argues that the habits formed at the canyon test ground, incremental tests, rapid revision and hardware designed around real constraints, became principles for its later work on propulsion, guidance and spacecraft.¹ The next chapter, a satellite launched in January 1958 on an Army Jupiter C rocket, is told under Explorer 1.⁶ The original test ground sits just beyond the laboratory’s eastern edge, and any question about a particular parcel nearby belongs with a reader’s own advisors. The comparison below sets the student project of 1936 beside the company it had produced six years later.

Figure

The rocket project in 1936 and in 1942

	1936	1942
Who	Frank Malina with Jack Parsons and Ed Forman, asking von Kármán for help	Von Kármán, Malina, Andrew Haley and others running a new company
Name	Caltech Rocket Research Project	Aerojet Engineering Corporation, incorporated March 19
Goal	A high altitude sounding rocket for a dissertation	Jet assisted takeoff units for the armed services
Propellant work	Early solid and liquid fuel experiments	Aniline with red fuming nitric acid, igniting on contact
Backing	Approval from von Kármán	Army Air Corps contracts and wartime demand