Sex and Rockets

by John Carter

  While waiting, Parsons and Forman launched their own powder rockets. Malina wrote, “[T]heir attitude is symptomatic of the anxiety of pioneers of new technological developments. In order to obtain support for their dreams, they are under pressure to demonstrate them before they can be technically accomplished.”

  Parsons is mentioned in Malina's letters a couple of times during this period and the months following. For the record, Malina wrote on November 21, 1936 that Parsons had the flu the previous week. Though the first successful test of a solid-fuel rocket motor took place in January 1937, Malina didn't think much of it at the time, as it is not even mentioned.

  The group left the arroyo next April and moved on-campus at Caltech, located right in Pasadena, where they worked out of one of the GALCIT lab buildings. Only von Kármán would have been daring enough to let these unsophisticated researchers work on-campus. In May, Hsue-shen Tsien, who had come from China on a scholarship funded by Boxer Rebellion reparations, began working with the group, sharing an office with Amo Smith. Weld Arnold, a meteorology student, contributed by presenting the group with $1000 in small bills wrapped in a newspaper. No one dared ask where he got them. A small fund was opened at Caltech, and the money deposited. Curiously, at the end of the war there was still $300 left in the account. Arnold became the group's unofficial photographer for a while, riding his bicycle at least 20 miles from Los Angeles every day.

  Campus residents soon resented the group's presence. Testing was loud and violent. Immediately after their arrival on campus, the group met with their first disaster. In the lab they had mounted a rocket motor to a 50-foot pendulum. They measured the swing of the pendulum to calculate the thrust produced. The first motor tested exploded, filling the building with a cloud of methyl alcohol and nitrogen dioxide. A thin layer of rust formed on many pieces of valuable equipment throughout the lab. The other campus residents started referring to the group as “the Suicide Squad.” Parsons would remember this event four years later, when he finally figured out a way to put the volatility of red fuming nitric acid (RFNA) to good use.

  Von Kármán moved the group outside, adjacent to the lab, and had them rebuild the pendulum, this time making it five times stronger than thought necessary. Two years later the pendulum was destroyed again during an explosion, when a piece of steel was hurled into the wall where Malina had been standing just minutes earlier. Fortunately, he had been called away by von Kármán's secretary on some mundane matter concerning a typewriter. After this dangerous incident, back to the arroyo the group went.

  On March 22 there is another brief mention of Parsons in Malina's letters, and on April 24 Malina related that Parsons was writing a paper “on the chemistry end of it.” This paper was entitled “A Consideration of the Practicality of Various Substances as Fuels for Jet Propulsion.” The finished paper is dated June 19, 1937, and is signed “J. Parsons, Halifax Explosives Company.” Despite its origin, it was later classified by the government but has long been declassified and is on file at the JPL archives, the only paper in the archives bearing Parsons’ name as the sole author. He was co-author on several other papers, but this one was his alone.

  The paper begins:

  In considering the practicality of various fuels and oxidizers for rockets, certain criteria apply which are not met with in ordinary internal combustion motor problems.

  Since rocket performance is influenced by the ratio of fuel weight to total weight, and since the rocket must carry all the oxidizer necessary for combustion, the ratio of total weight of fuel and oxidizer to the available energy is of utmost importance. Since mass per unit flow is also important, a high specific gravity is preferred.

  In addition, ordinary considerations of safety, availability, cost and convenient physical state should not be neglected.

  Parsons was saying that the fuel must be dense to pack a real punch, and be powerful enough to lift its own weight as well as that of the rocket and the cargo it may be carrying. This seemingly obvious statement is one that nevertheless must be made at the start of analysis. In the paper, Parsons presents five tables of various fuels with some algebraic calculations and chemical equations determining various properties of each. These calculations make it clear that Parsons was no amateur rocket hobbyist. He was, as everyone said, the theoretician of the group, even if he was an impatient theoretician. Parsons had obvious mathematical and scientific knowledge to back up his assertions. Malina specialized in differential calculus, which does not appear in the work of Parsons.

  Parsons’ first table looks at the explosive gases acetylene, butane, butyne, hydrogen, and methane. He dismisses acetylene as inherently dangerous, without carrying out the calculations of combustive properties. He further mentions potential problems with hydrogen and methane. Liquid oxygen is not even in the table, as Parsons eliminates it from calculations altogether as being too dangerous. He was right about this for decades. Only when the safe handling of liquid oxygen was finally perfected did it replace the liquid fuel combinations that Parsons himself would help perfect.

  Table II contains the liquid hydrocarbons methyl alcohol, ethyl alcohol, propargyl, benzol, ethyl ether, and heptane. All had great availability, were cheap and easy to handle, but all had a low energy content.

  Table III contains self-combustibles (explosives) such as gunpowder, etc., the energy content of which was low compared to gases and liquids, and which were difficult to handle. With a few precautions, Parsons added, they might be rendered useful. Parsons even mentioned that they might be “moulded or pressed into sticks,” which was the seed of an idea that would later lead to success.

  Table IV addresses metal organics and hybrids. Little was known about them, Parsons said, and they were costly to handle and difficult to prepare. One of them, trimethyl aluminum, is spontaneously inflammable in air. Parsons believed they were worthy of further investigation, though nothing seems to have come of it.

  Table V is labeled “Various Elements” and contains figures for aluminum, boron, carbon, lithium, and magnesium. Parsons thought they may have some value when blended with other substances, for which aluminum was already being used in the field of explosives. Parsons further thought the energy obtained from such blends could be used indirectly to heat another substance, such as water.

  There is also a sixth table, which lists not fuels but oxidizers, substances introduced into a chemical process to speed combustion. Much experimentation remained to be done with oxidizers, Parsons concluded. The 13-page paper contains six appendices showing values for different materials obtained through actual experimentation by Parsons and others. These appendices represent the real-world follow-up to the theoretical calculations showed in the first part of the report. The appendices reflects not only the up-front calculations but also actual tests of fuel mixtures at Halifax. Documenting each step represents a lengthy but necessary process. No definite conclusions were reached, but Parsons always saw in each experiment the beginning of another. Each test led to new ideas for him, and he never stopped thinking.

  The cover of Astronautics uses a schematic diagram of Parsons’, Forman's and Malina's GALCIT liquid fuel research set-up.

  Malina credits Parsons’ paper with the development of red fuming nitric acid as a storable oxidizer. He also pointed out that Parsons first anticipated the use of boron hydride as a fuel in this paper, putting him ahead of his time. The key, as von Kármán said, was to make the fuel burn slowly. In armaments applications the fuel was burned as quickly as possible. Parsons and Forman had to unlearn this technique and find a new one.

  When the term ended the next month, Malina paid Parsons a visit. On May 22—before the paper was actually finished, Malina wrote, “Antelope Valley, near New Hall—This weekend I accepted an invitation of Jack Parsons to spend at the house he has rented near the powder company for which he works. Jack's wife [Helen] is here which ensures good meals. We are about 40 miles from Pasadena in the foothills.”

  Antelope Valley is the curr
ent site of Edwards Air Force Base—a large valley—and it is uncertain if the powder company Halifax, for which Parsons labored, was anywhere near the base. Several explosives companies came from Antelope Valley, all conveniently remote from the city. John and Helen Parsons must not have lived there very long, for the Pasadena city directories show them living at 168 S. Terrace Drive from 1937 to 1940. Perhaps they retained the house at S. Terrace, which they owned, and rented the house intermittently in Antelope Valley until Parsons finished his paper in June.

  While writing the paper, Parsons commuted back to Pasadena to do additional testing with GALCIT. That group achieved its best results yet in May, running a motor for longer than a minute. However, the graduate students finished their term and summer arrived and drifted away. Malina and Tsien focused on doctorate programs. Weld went to New York. Those who stayed behind collected their papers on rocketry into what they called “the Bible,” copies of which exist in the JPL archives. Parsons’ paper was among the half-dozen or so in the volume.

  Around this time, Parsons and Malina started to write “a novel with an anti-war plot” that was also supposed to serve as a movie treatment. The manuscript is framed in anti-capitalist beliefs, with Malina documenting his own struggles with corporate culture and the coming war in Europe. Some writers have claimed the manuscript was some sort of sci-fi story about a flight to the moon, or about evil rocket scientists. This is not the case.

  The original script is in the possession of Marjorie Malina, Frank's widow. It is untitled and bears no author's name, and is entirely in Malina's handwriting. Malina's memoirs make it clear that Parsons was a collaborator and that Malina worked on the manuscript at Parsons’ house. Indeed, Malina expressed being nervous about being around the tetranitromethane in Parsons’ kitchen—a chemical that Parsons was collecting though the army decided it was too dangerous to use due to its connection to several deaths. Because of its rarity, Parsons was stockpiling the stuff rather than disposing of it, and also had enough gunpowder hoarded “to blow up a city block”—this according to Ed Forman's first wife, who probably was not exaggerating. The gunpowder was in an open barrel on the back porch. After Parsons’ death, Malina wrote that “Parsons’ familiarity with explosives led to contempt.”

  The 38-page handwritten synopsis of the script is full of crossed-out passages and other editing marks, indicating that the two men brainstormed together as Malina set it all to paper. The story is about a group of rocket scientists—obviously based on themselves and their associates at Caltech—who are struggling to carry out pure research while other factions have more selfish aims for their work—anti-capitalist at almost every turn. The character based on Forman is a union organizer. The intellectual characters (and even their mechanics) are all philosophical heavies. The “bad guys” are all big industrial types and those who cater to them. The story is full of side stories involving love interests and the like. It is also eerily prophetic.

  The character based on Parsons is named “Theophile Belvedere,” whose description shows insight (and possibly a little humor) on Parsons’ part. Belvedere is “a mystic who speaks for religion and the organized church.” He is “extremely fanatical and is to used to add a sinister effect to the plot.” His description is worth quoting verbatim, but it should be kept in mind that the manuscript was an obvious first draft never taken beyond this stage.

  Theophile Belvedere is a tall slightly stooped, rosy cheeked man with a face whose lines continuously change from those of joy to those of misery. Shortly before the story opens he has been defrocked from the Franciscan order upon his own suggestion. In the monastery he has pursued a study of astronomy, a subject also of interest to the abbot. A small telescope had been built at the corner of the monastery enclosure where Belvedere spent many nights gazing at the stars. The monastery is located on a hill overlooking a small town of Spanish atmosphere. Once each year a fiesta is held in the town and for many years the monks have watched through niches in the enclosure the parade that took place on the closing night. On this night Belvedere, as usual, entered the space between the observatory and the corner of the enclosure. He is suddenly surprised by a young woman in pajamas who in her disarray clutches his arm. The next day Belvedere goes to the abbot and confesses his temptation and decides that he will leave the order. He learns that the young woman is the daughter of the abbot's brother who has been visiting the monastery. Belvedere returns to Rock [Pasadena] where he finds his fanatically religious mother being abused by her drunken husband. The family is on relief. Belvedere, having an M.S. degree in science, applies for a public school teaching position in the Rock High School. He is accepted and becomes a teacher of general science.

  Near the end of the story, Belvedere accidentally blows himself up trying to stop one of his experiments—it should be noted that this story was written 15 years before Parsons died the same way, an eerie prophecy. Further, the character based on Tsien gets sent back to China under suspicion of communism and drops out of touch with the others, an incident that also later occurred. Many of those who remain are investigated for their anti-capitalistic political beliefs, and Malina's greatest fear—that their work would be used for wartime applications—also came true. In the story it is a rich investor who actually sells their secrets to the Nazis and Fascists.

  Included with the manuscript is another movie treatment, some of which is typed on MGM letterhead. Further handwritten technical descriptions (and illustrations) were composed in Malina's hand. The typed portion is dated June 17, 1937 and entitled “Shadow of the Wing,” bearing Malina's name as author. The treatment appears to be a different movie project entirely, one that an “M. Balcon” at MGM was evidently considering. “Shadow of the Wing” is the story of a mock bomber mission from Australia to London that goes awry. The hero is the pilot, who lands the plane despite all odds. Both stories never went beyond a preliminary stage, the first due to a sudden influx of funding for the rocket project, the second for reasons unknown. Lack of interest on MGM's part, perhaps?

  On July 4, 1937, Malina wrote, “For our ‘fourth,’ Parsons and I are going to make some tests with a powder rocket motor,” which sounds like a suitable way to celebrate both the Fourth of July and the completion of Parsons’ paper just a few days earlier. On the 26th Malina wrote, “Parsons and I yesterday discussed the possibility of seeing Goddard again. Perhaps he and wife and I would drive to Roswell in his car, he to return while I go on to Texas…” They did not make the trip. The wording suggests that Parsons had visited Goddard previously, but such a trip is not recorded elsewhere.

  As the months proceeded, Malina focused on his doctoral thesis, which he had been postponing for some time. Work on the thesis moved him closer to Summerfield and further from Parsons. Malina next refers to the rocket project a full five months later, on December 18. “Parsons wants to make some tests this weekend” was all that Malina wrote, causing one to wonder why he even mentioned it. Later that December Malina lectured the local Sigma Xi chapter on “Facts and Fancies of Rockets.” And the group made the newspapers on January 26, 1938, when Malina and Smith traveled to New York to present a paper to the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences. Clark Millikan had convinced the school to put up $200 for the trip—Caltech's first direct financial support of the project. That day in January, articles appeared in the New York Times and the Houston Chronicle, as well as in the Los Angeles Times, New York Herald-Tribune, and Time magazine.

  The story begins, “A scheme for shooting an exploratory rocket to a height of 967 miles above the earth was unfolded today before a convention of aeronautical engineers.” Malina and Smith told the convention “the idea works in theory…whether it will work in fact depends on the efficiency of the rocket.” They proposed a three-stage rocket with a maximum velocity of 11,000 miles per hour. As a result of the publicity, a New York stuntman wanted to ride a rocket up 1000 feet and parachute down at county fairs, and one Hollywood radio station wanted to broadcast the sound of a rocket m
otor firing.

  On February 2, 1938, the Caltech student paper California Tech printed an article on rockets written by Malina with the help of Smith and Tsien. In April of 1938, the Associated Press released an item about the group's work that is worth quoting verbatim, as it is contains valuable information unrecorded in Malina's letters. It reads:

  Frank J. Molina [sic] and three student-scientists [probably Parsons, Forman, and Smith] are working on a motor from which they hope to develop another which will take a rocket nearly 100 miles above the earth's surface.

  They see it carrying instruments to obtain data useful in weather forecasting, records on cosmic radiation, facts valuable to astronomers and information for other scientific purposes.

  This motor, set up at the Guggenheim School of Aeronautics, California Institute of Technology, is a combustion chamber which mixes and burns gaseous oxygen and ethelene [sic] at 5000 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature about half that of the sun [!].

  The flaming gas comes out of the “exhaust” at a speed of around 9000 feet a second. With a “step rocket,” one with three motors, two of which would be released in flight, a speed of 11,000 feet a second might be reached, Molina said.

  “After experiments with gases, we will next try liquids,” said Molina, “for that is what the rocket will have to use. We can allow only seven-tenths of the total weight of the rocket for propellants.

  “The design of the rocket will be highly important because of the difficulty in keeping one in a straight course. Experiments have shown rockets may be deflected in a change in air currents. A gyroscope may help meet this difficulty.

  “Our aim is to devise a rocket which will carry scientific instruments to heights of about 500,000 feet, far above those reached by sounding balloons. The record for a sounding balloon, I believe, is 110,000 feet. We are working everything out by theory, so far as is possible.”