Strange Angel (22 page)

 

The other day Dr. Robert Millikan said we should stop dreaming about atomic power and solar power ... As much as we love the doctor as one of our foremost scientists of the day, because he cannot see its realization or gets tired of research is no reason to give up hope that some scientist of the future might not attack the problem and ride it. What seems utterly impossible today may be commonplace tomorrow.”

 

Also present was the science writer and former member of the German rocket society the VfR, Willy Ley, who had fled from Nazi Germany in 1935 as the German army had taken control of the rocket projects. Although he came to spur the young enthusiasts to imagine the very real possibilities of space travel, his attendance could not help but qualify the fans' boundless optimism in the future. A rampantly Fascist Germany had recently annexed Czechoslovakia; Italy had invaded Abyssinia. Britain, France, and the Soviet Union were squabbling ineffectually about the best way to block further Nazi expansion. As the world was being wracked by political ideologies, so the science fiction community had become riven by its own byzantine political struggles, as if mimicking the tumultuous events on the world stage. Two radically opposed fan organizations, the Futurians and New Fandom, had declared that they would be attending the convention. The politicized Futurians, whose ranks included a young Isaac Asimov, held that science fiction should rise to “a vision [of] a greater world, a greater future for the whole of mankind, and [should] utilize ... idealistic convictions for aid in a generally cooperative and diverse movement for the betterment of the world along democratic, impersonal, and unselfish lines.” Opposed to them was New Fandom, the group that had organized the convention, who insisted that science fiction be read purely as entertainment. To them the Futurians were “dangerously red”; indeed, many Futurians were also members of the American Communist Party. Scuffles ensued and some Futurians were barred from entering the convention. For the apolitical Ackerman, who had bedecked himself in a silver Buck Rogers space suit to celebrate the occasion, “It was a moment of immortal sadness.” As usual, science fiction was proving remarkably prescient: Soon science, and the Suicide Squad's rocketry project itself, would become swept up into the realm of politics.

 

Just months earlier, at a meeting of the Scientific Research Society, Sigma Xi, Frank Malina had given a talk which might have fit in at either the World's Fair or the science fiction convention. Entitled “Facts and Fancies of Rockets,” it suggested that rockets strapped under the wings of a plane could greatly improve its performance. Following the lecture, Theodore von Kármán asked Malina if he would go to Washington, D.C., to give expert information on rocket propulsion to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Army Air Corps Research, on which Kármán sat. The NAS brought together committees of experts in all areas of scientific and technological endeavor to provide critical assistance to the government. Malina's trip was to be strictly secret.

General Henry “Hap” Arnold, Chief of the United States Army Air Corps and a close friend of Kármán's, had asked the NAS to study two critical problems of heavy bomber aircraft—the de-icing of windows on bombers flying at high altitude and the need to find something to assist the takeoff of heavily laden aircraft in combat zones, since sufficiently long runways would likely be hard to find in war zones. To Kármán, the Suicide Squad's rocket work seemed to offer the solution to this latter question.

Malina arrived in Washington, but he did not talk about rockets: He and Kármán had decided that because of the poor reputation of the word
rocket
in serious scientific circles, he should abandon it in favor of the word
jet.
Thus it was that the NAS heard of “jet propulsors” strapped under the bodies of planes to boost the speed, range, and takeoff time of aircraft. “Jets” would transform airplanes, allowing them to break free from the constraints imposed by the propeller. Naturally, Malina said coyly, he could not be too detailed about the exact benefits, as research was still in its infancy. However, if the committee would offer some financial backing, Malina was sure that he and the Rocket Research Group could help create record-breaking changes in aviation.

Seduced by both Malina's talk of “jet” planes and Kármán's wholehearted backing of the plan, the NAS gave the Suicide Squad $1,000 to prepare a proposal for a full-time research program into Jet-Assisted Take-Off (JATO) by June 1939. They were to show that it was possible to create rocket engines facilitating the “super-performance” of aircraft—in other words, that rockets, when attached to a plane, could shorten the time and distance of takeoff, increase the rate of climb, and increase the level-flight speed. The report was to be an extension of the work they had been doing sporadically up until now and was to feature detailed studies on “jet propulsors” fueled by gas, liquid, and solid propellants. Kármán would act as the project's guide.

Many still thought the project was a waste of time and money: Jerome Hunsaker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who had taken up the other problem of de-icing bomber windshields, contemptuously told Kármán, “You can have the Buck Rogers' job.” But Malina, Parsons, and Forman were ecstatic. It was their first funding since Weld Arnold's mysterious donation a year and a half earlier. Now it was another Arnold who had come to their rescue, backed by the seemingly limitless budget of the armed forces. The work of the past three years was to be rewarded. “We could even expect,” remembered an amazed Malina, “to be paid for doing our rocket research!”

Parsons and Forman would work full time for $200 a month—double what they had earned at the powder companies—while Malina would put in half time and defer taking his degree. The windfall would not only allow Parsons to “afford smoking ready-rolled cigarettes” again; it would also ease the burden on Helen, who was working full-time to support them both. Parsons, now twenty-five, and Forman and Malina, both twenty-seven, became the United States first government-sanctioned rocket group.

 

You can take the rocket scientist out of the Arroyo, but you can't take the Arroyo out of the rocket scientist. Government sponsorship may have lent the rocketeers a veneer of respectability; however, it was the same old Suicide Squad, now reduced to the core trio of Parsons, Forman, and Malina, that continued research. The group's recklessness did not decrease, nor did the new funds lessen the dangers of their work. Once again the Caltech campus resounded with the “unnerving explosions of Parsons' rockets,” noted Kármán.

On one occasion in their hut outside the GALCIT building, Parsons was testing a volatile ethylene-and-gaseous-oxygen mixture as a possible liquid fuel. Malina was sitting on a stool, marking down the numbers on various gauges connected to the rocket, when he remembered that Kármán had asked him to deliver a typewriter to his home. It's unclear whether the removal of Malina's controlling presence provoked Parsons to push the apparatus too far, or whether the equipment simply had a structural fault, but shortly after Malina left, two huge explosions cracked through the monastic quiet of Caltech's buildings. Smoke billowed upwards and a crowd rushed out from the nearby buildings. They found blackened concrete, burnt sandbags, and a shaken Parsons and Forman clutching their heads. An oxygen line had caught fire and ignited the oxygen tank itself. When Malina returned from Kármán's, he saw that one of the gauges from the apparatus had been propelled deep into the concrete wall, exactly where his head would have been had he stayed. The incident was just the latest in a long line of lucky escapes. The apparatus was not so lucky. Damage worth $250 was done, one quarter of their grant, and some serious rebuilding was needed.

Parsons and Forman were working full time, arriving late in the morning and working late into the night. Soon they were able to show that a rocket providing “super-performance” for aircraft was well within their reach. When they delivered their paper to the NAS in June, they felt sufficiently confident to ask for a budget of $100,000 to fund further research and construction of the rockets themselves. But when Kármán took the report to Washington, he found that their confidence was not shared by the NAS; the old prejudice against rockets was still strong. The rocketeers' budget was set at $10,000, and at least one member of the board was flabbergasted at even this sum. “Do you honestly believe,” Kármán was asked, “that the Air Corps should spend as much as $10,000 for such a thing as rockets?”

 

The rocketeers were quite happy to get this princely sum, even if it was less than they had asked for. For Parsons and especially Malina, military sponsorship was no longer quite the Faustian contract it had once seemed. Not only had their ethical qualms been slowly eroded by four long years of temporary employment and poverty, but the rise of Fascism had given a different moral shade to their work. “We decided that we were going to use rocketry to defeat Fascists,” recalled Malina. “We felt that socially responsible engineers and scientists at that time had a mission to perform.” The fact that they had been asked to create rockets not as munitions but as aids for aircraft also helped. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, instigating the Second World War, the rocketeers' task became all the more imperative.

Despite the fact that they were members of America's first university-based rocketry program, now referred to as “GALCIT Project Number One,” Parsons and Forman had not endeared themselves to Caltech. An invisible barrier—thrown up by both their happy-go-lucky personalities and the infra dig nature of the rocket work itself—prevented them from ever being truly accepted into the body of Caltech's scientists. Jeanne Forman, Ed Forman's third wife, felt that the resentment stemmed from jealousy. “Here were these ‘dumb' people who were getting honors [from the military]. How dare they, when they hadn't gone to university.” Parsons and Forman's joy in explosions, their tendency to follow whims, and their contempt for safety procedures would forever set them apart from the scientific establishment, even as it eventually came to embrace rocketry. Even Malina never fully reconciled himself to the explosive nature of their experimentation. “Sometimes,” Malina groaned, “they are like inventors, in the worst sense of the word.”

An example of this prejudice reared its head at a formal dinner held for various staff members at the illustrious Athenaeum, the Caltech faculty club. With its giant fireplace, oriental rugs, soft lamplight, and air of extreme erudition, the Athenaeum, said one architectural critic, made one feel like a Nobel Prize winner just by entering it. When Parsons and Forman received invitations to the meal, they thought they were finally receiving their just deserts for years of unpaid research; when they discovered that Malina hadn't received one, they ribbed him endlessly about it. An invitation for Malina did eventually arrive the day before the dinner—but it was accompanied by a note saying that Parsons and Forman had only been sent invitations because of a clerical error. Even though Parsons was by now listed in the Caltech staff directory, the privilege of attending the dinner was apparently reserved for “proper” Caltech members. Even for the thick-skinned Parsons and Forman, such a revelation would have been a slap in the face. Malina “didn't have the heart to tell them that they were invited by mistake” and so Parsons and Forman attended the black-tie dinner in high spirits, oblivious to the slight, and were “staff members for the night.”

 

The Suicide Squad were now asked to deliver what they had promised in their report to NAS. The army air corps wanted a solid-fuel rocket that could deliver a constant, powerful thrust for at least ten seconds in order to give enough sustained lift to heavy bombers trundling down short runways. With his usual optimism, Parsons had felt certain that he could create a rocket to match these specifications. But there was a significant problem: As far as the rocketeers knew, the longest anybody had ever gotten a black powder rocket to burn was little more than five seconds. And even then the fuel did not burn steadily, producing thrust that was both weak and irregular. Parsons' confidence belied the fact that black powder rockets were still little more than fireworks, barely changed since their invention a millennium ago.

“A propellant needed to be found that could provide the proper thrust in a controlled manner,” recalled Kármán in his memoirs. “This meant that the burning of the propellant in the rocket chamber had to proceed evenly, so that the pressure of the exhaust gases would not drop during the critical period of take-off.” Parsons realized that he had to create a new type of rocket, one with a propellant that would act as a slow burning charge. In theory it was quite simple. The rocket fuel needed to burn like a cigarette, from one end only (known as “restricted burning”), rather than being allowed to ignite on all sides instantaneously or burning along only one side of the rocket wall. If restricted burning could be achieved, depending on the dimensions of the “cigarette,” any duration of stable thrust could be obtained.

Parsons knew he would need to create a fuel in the form of a “dense, tough, hard cylinder, completely free from cracks, which is pressed against the propulsor chamber [the rocket motor] wall to form a gas tight union with the wall.” He began mixing low explosive black powder with high explosive smokeless powder. He then coated both the fuel and the inside of the rocket motor with various substances, even glue, to try to form a solid or liquid seal between the charge and the rocket motor walls. But the mixtures frequently cracked and formed fissures as they dried, enlarging the burning surface and causing uneven burns and explosions. He consulted explosives experts from the Halifax Powder Company, but they declared combustion of solid fuels in a rocket chamber to be inherently unstable.