GALCIT and JPL

Meanwhile, a much smaller American effort at rocket develop­ment began at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1936. A graduate student of aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman, Frank J. Malina, together with Edward S. Forman and John W. Par­sons—described respectively by Malina as “a skilled mechanic" and “a self-trained chemist" without formal schooling but with “an un­inhibited fruitful imagination"—began to do research for Malina’s doctoral dissertation on rocket propulsion and flight.22 Gradually, 16 the research of these three men expanded into a multifaceted, pro­Chapter 1 fessional rocket development effort. As with the work under von Braun in Germany, there were many problems to be overcome. The difficulty of both endeavors lay partly in the lack of previous, de­tailed research-and-development reports. It also resulted from the

many disciplines involved. In May 1945, Homer E. Newell, then a theoretical physicist and mathematician at the U. S. Naval Re­search Laboratory, wrote that the “design, construction, and opera­tional use of guided missiles requires intimate knowledge of a vast number of subjects. Among these. . . are aerodynamics, kinemat­ics, mechanics, elasticity, radio, electronics, jet propulsion, and the chemistry of fuels."23 He could easily have added other topics such as thermodynamics, combustion processes, and materials science.

Malina and his associates consulted existing literature. Malina paid a visit to Goddard in 1936 in a fruitless attempt to gather un­published information and cooperation from the secretive New Englander.24 Initially as part of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Lab­oratory at Caltech (GALCIT), directed by von Karman (and after 1943-44 as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory [JPL]), Malina and his staff used available data, mathematics, experimentation, innovations by other U. S. rocketeers, and imagination to develop solid – and liquid-propellant JATOs (jet-assisted takeoff devices), a Private A solid-propellant test rocket, and a WAC Corporal liquid-propellant sounding rocket before Malina left JPL in 1946 and went to Europe. He ultimately became an artist and a promoter of international cooperation in astronautics.25 (Incidentally, in 1942 several of the people at GALCIT founded the Aerojet Engineering Corporation, later known as Aerojet General Corporation, to produce the rocket engines they developed. It became one of the major rocket firms in the country.)26

Under the successive leadership of Louis Dunn and William Pick­ering, JPL proceeded to oversee and participate in the development of the liquid-propellant Corporal and the solid-propellant Sergeant missiles for the U. S. Army. Their development encountered many problems, and they borrowed some engine-cooling technology from the V-2 to solve one problem with the Corporal, illustrating one case where the V-2 influenced U. S. missile development. The Cor­poral became operational in 1954 and deployed to Europe beginning in 1955. Although never as accurate as the army had hoped, it was far superior in this respect to the V-2. At 45.4 feet long, the Corporal was less than a foot shorter than the V-2, but its diameter (2.5 feet) was slightly less than half that of the German missile. However, even with a slightly higher performance than the V-2, its range (99 statute miles) was only about half that of the earlier missile, mak­ing it a short-lived and not very effective weapon.27

In 1953, JPL began working on a solid-propellant replacement for the Corporal, known as the Sergeant. In February 1956, a Sergeant contractor-selection committee unanimously chose the Sperry Gyro-

scope Company (a division of Sperry Rand Corp.) as a co-contractor for the development and ultimate manufacture of the missile. Mean­while, on April 1, 1954, the Redstone Arsenal, which controlled de­velopment of the missile for the army, had entered into a supple­mental agreement with the Redstone Division of Thiokol Chemical Corporation to work on the Sergeant’s solid-propellant motor. The program to develop Sergeant began officially in January 1955.28

The Sergeant missile took longer to develop than originally planned and did not become operational until 1962, by which time the U. S. Navy had completed the much more capable and important Polaris A1 and the U. S. Air Force was close to fielding the significant and successful Minuteman I. The technology of the Sergeant paled by comparison. JPL director Louis Dunn had warned in 1954 that if the army did not provide for an orderly research and development program for the Sergeant, “ill-chosen designs. . . [would] plague the system for many years." In the event, the army did fail to pro­vide consistent funding and then insisted on a compressed sched­ule. This problem was complicated by differences between JPL and Sperry and by JPL’s becoming a NASA instead of an army contractor in December 1958. The result was a missile that failed to meet its in-flight reliability of 95 percent. It met a slipped ordnance sup­port readiness date of June 1962 but remained a limited-production weapons system until June 1968. However, it was equal to its pre­decessor, Corporal, in range and firepower while being only half as large and requiring less than a third as much ground support equip­ment. Its solid-propellant motor could be ready for firing in a matter of minutes instead of the hours required for the liquid-propellant Corporal. An all-inertial guidance system on Sergeant made it vir­tually immune to enemy countermeasures, whereas Corporal de­pended on a vulnerable electronic link to guidance equipment on the ground.29

Thus, Sergeant was far from a total failure. In fact, although not at the forefront of solid-propellant technology by the time of its com­pletion, the army missile made some contributions to the develop­ment of launch-vehicle technology—primarily through a smaller, test version of the rocket. JPL had scaled down Sergeant motors from 31 to 6 inches in diameter for performing tests on various solid propellants and their designs. By 1958, the Lab had performed static 18 tests on more than 300 of the scaled-down motors and had flight – Chapter 1 tested 50 of them—all without failures. Performance had accorded well with predictions. These reliable motors became the basis for upper stages in reentry test vehicles for the Jupiter missile (called Jupiter C) and in the launch vehicles for Explorer and Pioneer satel-

lites, which used modified Redstone and Jupiter C missiles as first stages.30

Because von Braun’s group of engineers developed the Redstone and Jupiter C, this was an instance where purely American and German-American technology blended. It is instructive to compare management at JPL with that in von Braun’s operation in Germany. At JPL, the dynamic von Karman served as director of the project until the end of 1944, when he left to establish the Scientific Ad­visory Board for the U. S. Army Air Forces. Malina held the title of chief engineer of the project until he succeeded von Karman as (acting) director. But according to Martin Summerfield, head of a liquid-propellant section, there was no counterpart at GALCIT/JPL to von Braun at Peenemunde. Instead, Summerfield said, the way the professionals in the project integrated the various components of the rockets and the various developments in fields as disparate as aerodynamics and metallurgy was simply by discussing them as colleagues. He seemed to suggest that much of this was done infor­mally, but like Peenemunde, JPL also had many formal meetings where such issues were discussed. In addition, a research analysis section did a good deal of what later was called systems engineering for JPL.31

Dunn succeeded Malina as acting director of JPL on May 20, 1946, becoming the director (no longer acting) on January 1, 1947. Whereas Malina operated in an informal and relaxed way, Dunn brought more structure and discipline to JPL than had prevailed pre­viously. He was also cautious, hence concerned about the growth of the Lab during his tenure. From 385 employees in June 1946, the number grew to 785 in 1950 and 1,061 in 1953, causing Dunn to create division heads above the section heads who had reported to him directly. There were four such division heads by Septem­ber 1950, with William Pickering heading one on guided-missile electronics.

In August 1954, Dunn resigned from JPL to take a leading role in developing the Atlas missile for the recently established Ramo – Wooldridge Corporation. At Dunn’s suggestion, Caltech appointed Pickering as his successor. A New Zealander by birth, Pickering continued the tradition of having foreign-born directors at JPL (von Karman coming from Hungary and Malina, Czechoslovakia). Easier to know than the formal Dunn, Pickering was also less stringent as a manager. Whereas Dunn had favored a project form of organization, Pickering returned to one organized by disciplines. He remained as director until 1976. Howard Seifert, who had come to GALCIT in 1942 and worked with Summerfield on liquid-propellant develop-

ments, characterized the three JPL directors in terms of an incident when some mechanics cut off the relaxed Malina’s necktie because he was too formal. Seifert said they would never have cut Dunn’s necktie off without losing their jobs, and they would not have cut Pickering’s necktie either, but he would not have fired them for that offense alone. He added that Dunn had a rigid quality but undoubt­edly was extremely capable.32

Despite all the changes in personnel and management from Ma – lina and von Karman, through Dunn to Pickering, and despite the differences in personalities and values, one constant seems to have been a not-very-structured organization, not well suited for dealing with outside industry and the design and fielding of a weapon sys­tem, as distinguished from a research vehicle. Even Dunn’s project organization seems not to have been compatible with the kind of systems engineering soon common in missile development.33

It may be, however, that JPL’s rather loose organization in this period was conducive to innovations that it achieved in both liquid – and solid-propellant rocketry (to be discussed in ensuing chapters). In addition to the direct influence they had upon rocketry, many people from JPL besides Louis Dunn later served in positions of im­portance on other missile and rocket projects, carrying with them, no doubt, much that they had learned in their work at JPL, as well as their talents. Thus, in a variety of ways—some of them incal­culable—the early work at JPL contributed to U. S. rocketry, even though the Lab itself got out of the rocket propulsion business in the late 1950s.34