Sex and Rockets

by John Carter

  An essay in Rapid Eye #3 entitled “Whence Came the Stranger” seems to document a definite relationship between Heinlein and Parsons. In this essay, Adam Rostoker wrote, “Parsons and Heinlein were quite close friends. They may have met at the Los Angeles Science Fiction Fan Club [Science Fantasy Society], which maintained a reading room…[They] were certainly seen there together.” In a footnote he related that Marjorie Cameron, Parsons’ second wife, was the source of this information: “Heinlein was the first person Parsons ever introduced her to. She didn't care for Heinlein too much; he was ‘too slick, too Hollywood. But Jack and he were good friends.’” Adam Rostoker is the same “Adam Walks-Between-Worlds” of the Church of All Worlds which was inspired by Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. He may have published a similar article in that organization's Green Egg magazine.

  Williamson documents science writer and member of the German Rocket Society Willy Ley's occasional presence at meetings of the Mañana Literary Society, an informal science fiction discussion group which met at Heinlein's house, so Parsons may have met his old correspondent there—assuming he was in fact a part of Heinlein's circle.

  Meanwhile, in Parsons’ other life, the GALCIT group realized its first big success in August 1941. Parsons had come to realize that the rocket motors, now called jet-assisted take-offs (JATOs) to avoid the charged term “rocket,” had to be used almost immediately, as they could not be stored for long periods of time or in extremes of temperature. He and Forman would get up very early and prepare the JATOs, nap a little, then meet the others at March Field. Von Kármán wrote, “He [Parsons] used a paper-lined cylinder into which he pressed a black-powder propellant of his own composition in one-inch layers.” In August, the group was ready to test Parsons’ JATOs on actual aircraft, the first time this type of rocket had ever been used.

  The fuel used was called GALCIT-27, implying 26 failures before it. The airplane chosen was a hobby plane called the “Ercoupe,” chosen because it was small, light and hard to stall. The pilot was Captain Homer A. Boushey, Jr. of the Army Air Corps, a graduate student of von Kármán's. Also present was another graduate student, Homer Joe Stewart, to whom was addressed a signed copy of Frank Malina's memoirs in the possession of the JPL archives.

  The GALCIT-27 event was recorded on color film, a copy of which resides in the Library of Congress. The silent original, along with some outtakes, is in the JPL archives. Both the original and the outtakes feature Parsons sporting a goatee and small mustache.

  By this time Weld Arnold had been replaced as the group's photographer by George Emerson, an Englishman, after whose arrival the quality of still photographs improved dramatically. Emerson stayed with JPL for 40 years as the lab's chief photographer, while Weld went to New York and, in the 1950s, ended up on the Board of Trustees at the University of Nevada, where Malina found him. The two corresponded until Weld's death in 1961.

  Parsons was right about using the JATOs immediately, and, on August 6, 1941, one week after some nerve-wracking static tests in which the JATOs “exploded like the Fourth” 12 of the rockets were mounted under the wings of the Ercoupe. The JATOs each delivered 28 pounds of thrust for 12 seconds—336 pounds thrust total. The group had never seen a plane climb so steeply. The film clearly shows the plane leveling off immediately when the JATOs’ fuel supply was exhausted. The JATOs were a success, and Parsons was to credit.

  Some of the footage was shot from the air, in Clark Millikan's small plane. The ground footage showing the Ercoupe taking off alongside Millikan's plane reveals quite dramatically the difference the JATOs made: Takeoff distance was reduced over 30%. During one of the tests a nozzle shot off the end of a JATO, bounced off the runway, and tore a hole in the plane's fuselage near the tail. “At least it wasn't a big hole,” one of the group joked. Undaunted, the pilot Boushey continued flying. The tests also continued, running until August 12.

  The JATOs were envisioned for use wherever short runways were constructed. If the Army Air Corps were in some remote locale with rough terrain or lots of trees, a short runway would save the labor and expense of a lot of men. The second use was for quick getaways in the air. If an enemy plane came up behind a pilot who had JATOs, the latter could ignite the rockets and get out of the enemy's line of fire. Footage of this sort of maneuver is also included in the August 1941 film. Hap Arnold's original idea to utilize the JATOs to help overloaded aircraft take off was not a part of the tests, though it was put to use during the war.

  On August 23, the propeller was then removed from the Ercoupe to demonstrate flight under rocket power only, the hole covered with three safety banners the group found at the site. One banner in particular amused them: “Ask yourself: what about tomorrow if I meet with an accident today?” To gain sufficient speed to get it off the ground, the Ercoupe was towed by a rope connected to Rudolph Schott's red pickup truck. As the truck accelerated to 25 mph, Boushey held the rope in his hand as long as he could, then dropped it and ignited the JATOs. It worked, and the success of the overall Ercoupe flight test earned the group a contract with the Navy. Parsons’ and Malina's written report on the Ercoupe tests is in the JPL archives.

  Three patents for liquid fuel discoveries were finally awarded Parsons and Malina a full two years after Parsons died.

  An oft-reproduced photo from the Ercoupe tests hints at the change in relationship between Parsons and Malina. Von Kármán is shown writing on the wing of the Ercoupe (suggesting the shot was staged), while Clyde Miller, Clark Millikan, Martin Summerfield, Frank Malina, and Homer Boushey look on. This photo is usually referred to as the “technical group.” Why was Summerfield there? His specialty was liquid-fuel rockets, and this was a solid fuel test. And where was Parsons? He was always referred to as the “theoretician,” with Forman being the mechanic. Parsons is in a separate photo, with the “flight test crew”: Fred Miller (an “explosives technician”), Ed Forman, Malina, Boushey, and a couple of Air Force mechanics. If the technical crew photo had been a candid photo rather than a publicity photo, Parsons would have appeared; Summerfield would not. A large group photo from the same tests includes Helen Parsons, John's first wife. (See photo section.)

  It is reported that patents exist in Parsons’ name on solid-fuel JATOs and that he shares them with Mark M. Mills, one of his assistants. Frank Malina wrote that only Parsons would have thought of abandoning black powder and smokeless powder for more exotic solid fuels, which was way out of Malina's and Hsue-shen Tsien's league. It was also Parsons’ idea to pour in one-inch thick layers, from the bottom up, to control the burn rate, a process that had not been done before.

  It has been said that Parsons held a total of seven patents altogether, but the three I was able to find were for liquid-fuel rockets, not solid. On display in the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., is a specimen of an early solid-fuel JATO. The unit's spark plug is not for ignition but for an insulated pathway into the fuel mixture; rather than going to the expense of constructing something new, the group just had Forman drill and thread a hole the size of a spark plug into the end of the JATO. The plug already had a built-in porcelain insulator surrounding the conductor, and wires were attached to either end of it, so electricity could be directed safely inside the casing to ignite the mixture.

  In early November 1941 one of their “boys,” as Malina put it, got drunk and stole a car at gunpoint from a young couple:

  He was a mechanic working with Jack, and it seems that he had gone to Parsons’ house. They'd had a seance—what they were doing I don't know—anyway [he] had a gun and he found a car on the street that was parked nearby. There was a couple necking in it. He forced them out at the point of the gun, took the car, drove to Hollywood, evidently not quite knowing what he was going to do. And then, after a certain amount of time, he drove back to Pasadena. When he arrived at the flagpole by the Colorado [Ave.] bridge, the police were waiting for him.

  Malina continued:

  I went to the
jail to talk to the fellow and asked him what exactly made him do a stupid thing like that. Well, he was very vague and I couldn't get anything out of Parsons or Forman as to why this had happened…It then became quite evident that whatever it was that Parsons and Forman were playing with had certain worrisome aspects.

  Hypnosis, perhaps? Forman never did join the Agape Lodge, but Parsons and he were very close and may easily have been sharing Parsons’ occult endeavors. The individual was released into Malina's custody, and the whole incident was kept quiet, simply because of the work going on at the school. War was imminent (the attack on Pearl Harbor was only a month away); there was no need to disrupt Caltech's work with an embarrassing detail like this.

  Meanwhile, at the lodge Parsons was becoming increasingly influential. In March of 1942, Jane Wolfe wrote to Crowley:

  I believe Jack Parsons—who is devoted to Wilfred [Smith]—to be the coming leader, with Wilfred in advisory capacity. I hope you two get together some day, although your present activities in England seem to have postponed the date of your coming to us [which never happened]. Jack, by the way, comes in through some inner experiences, but mostly, perhaps, through the world of science. That is, he was “sold on the Book of the Law” because it foretold Einstein, Heisenberg—whose work is not permitted in Russia—the quantum field folks, whose work is along the “factor infinite and unknown” lines [see Liber 49, v. 36], etc. You two would have a whale of a lot to talk over. He and Helen are lock, stock and barrel for the Order.

  That same year, Parsons also made an intuitive leap that changed the future of rocket motor technology. There are apocryphal stories concerning the inspiration for his idea, but Parsons seems to have taken the truth with him to the grave. 40 years later Homer Boushey told an International Association of Aeronautics and Astronautics (IAAA) group in Oslo that the idea had come to Parsons while watching some roofers apply hot asphalt. Frank Malina said that Parsons knew of “Greek Fire,” a mixture of pitch and other elements which the ancient Greeks used as flaming projectiles, hurling them at enemy ships during wars. However, Helen Parsons told an interviewer the idea had originated with her.

  As early as 1928, Parsons and Forman had used glue as a binder to hold their black powder and aluminum oxide in their little rocket motors. In 1942 Parsons had the idea to use liquid asphalt for this purpose. The asphalt was heated, then the fuel and the oxidizer were mixed in, and the mixture was poured directly into the casing rather than an intermediate molding and allowed to cool. Dubbed GALCIT-53, the mixture did not shrink and crack as had earlier mixtures.4 The new JATOs could be stored indefinitely, at either extreme of temperature, without the threat of explosion during use—and they could now be mass-produced. After Parsons left Aerojet, it was discovered that a hollow could be created in the center of the hardened fuel to provide increased surface area and thus an increased burning rate. At first they used a simple cylindrical shape, then later a star shape to further increase the surface area. This method was used in the Minuteman and Polaris missiles.

  Mark M. Mills and Fred S. Miller assisted Parsons with his work on the GALCIT-53 JATOs, which delivered 200 pounds of thrust for eight seconds—a 476% improvement over GALCIT-27. Parsons invented the method of pouring the heated, liquefied propellant, which involved priming the empty casing first with a little bit of the liquefied solution, letting it cool just enough to start to harden, and then pouring the remainder of the fuel inside. This method is still used today on the solid fuel boosters used on the Space Shuttle.

  Parsons also had the equally monumental idea to start using potassium perchlorate as an oxidizer, instead of aluminum and others. Successful variations on this idea included use of ammonium perchlorate for the same purpose. Potassium perchlorate was actually listed in the paper Parsons wrote at Antelope Valley for Halifax in 1937, but he did not comment on its potential at the time. What brought him back to it in 1942 is unknown.

  These breakthroughs led to the formation of the Aerojet Corporation on March 19, 1942, now one of the world's largest manufacturers of rockets. The founders were von Kármán, Malina, Summerfield, Parsons, Forman, and von Kármán's attorney Andrew Haley. Parsons and Forman had the idea to get a sponsor or form a corporation; Malina was the one who proposed the idea to von Kármán. Each put in $200, though Haley actually loaned all but von Kármán their share. Haley ended up putting in $2500, with the understanding that the others would pay him back later. The five assigned all future patents to the company, and Malina and Haley came up with the name Aerojet. Parsons and Forman immediately left GALCIT for Aerojet. The group still worked on projects together, with Aerojet employees selling their services as consultants to GALCIT. The company grew quickly.

  Haley seems to have been a hands-on kind of guy, as his interesting book, Rocketry and Space Exploration, contains several photos of him working directly with various manufacturing efforts at Aerojet. Often he worked in the office by day and in the plant by night.

  The group's next big success was with liquid JATOs. Parsons was still trying to find a way to use red fuming nitric acid (RFNA) as an oxidizer with fuels such as gasoline and benzene. RFNA was the chemical that had caused the large explosion—and the big mess—when the Suicide Squad was just getting started at Caltech. Current tests resulted in motors that burned but produced uneven burning which led to throbbing, caused by late ignition: The fuel did not begin burning immediately on contact with RFNA. Martin Summerfield's “instability of burning” law is still used to describe this phenomenon.

  On a trip east, an acquaintance of Malina's suggested using aniline to help control the burn rate of the mixture and reduce the throbbing. On the train ride home, Malina suddenly realized that RFNA and aniline ought to be self-igniting without the gasoline or benzene. He wired Summerfield back in Pasadena, who arranged a test with engineer Walter Powell and others. The event was recorded on film: a small crucible sits on the ground, while a hand reaches in, holding a long pole at the end of which is another small crucible. When the contents of one were poured into the other, the mixture did indeed ignite into a huge flame, and the group was on their way to the perfection of liquid-fuel rockets.

  With the help of attorney D. Gordon Angus, Parsons and Malina filed three patents on May 8, 1943 for various elements of this process. Parsons’ name is on these patents because he insisted on working with RFNA despite what others said about the fuel, a fact documented by Malina in his oral histories with JPL. Ironically, two of the three patents were not granted until after Parsons’ death in 1952. The patent numbers are 2,573,471 (“Reaction Motor Operable by Liquid Propellants and Method of Operating It,” patented October 30, 1951); 2,693,077 (a division of patent 2,573,471, patented November 2, 1954, but with seemingly little if any difference from the first patent); and 2,774,214 (“Rocket Propulsion Method,” patented December 18, 1956, which is basically the same proposal submitted under a different category).

  The group's acid-aniline mix was used as late as the Titan missile, at which time it was abandoned in favor of liquid oxygen, which had had finally been made manageable. [In an odd “coincidence,” the Great Beast Aleister Crowley referred to himself as “Teitan,” which is the original Greek spelling of “Titan,” because it adds to 666 in Greek gematria, a form of numerology.]

  The flight test of the new liquid fuel occurred on April 15, 1942 at Muroc Field in Antelope Valley, site of today's Edwards Air Force Base. Liquid JATOs were the first Aerojet project. A Douglas A-20A was flown first to the Burbank airport for preparations, then to the test field for the liquid JATO tests. The plane weighed 20,000 pounds, as much as several Ercoupes combined. Major Paul H. Dane of the Army Air Corps was the test pilot. Beverly Forman, Ed's cousin, sat in back of the plane. His job was to release the fuel mixture at the appropriate time. Two 1000-pound thrust JATOs were mounted under the A-20A's wings, each with a 25-second burn time. They were designed by Summerfield with the assistance of Walter B. Powell and Edward G. Croft, and had five times the power o
f GALCIT-53, although solid fuel maintained its value.

  A long, silent color film (three reels) exists of this event as well, located in the Library of Congress, as well as in the JPL archives. One excellent shot shows von Kármán, Malina, and Parsons walking side-by-side down the runway, discussing some issue about the tests: the three men who made rocketry viable—the great man, von Kármán, on one side, his protégé Malina in the middle, acting as go-between, and the man of the world, John Parsons, on the other side. These same three men later appeared in the same order on von Kármán's list of the top 10 people who had made American rocketry a possibility, occupying the first three positions.

  Take-off distance was again reduced in excess of 30%. At the end of the tests, Malina said, “We now have something that really works and we should be able to help give the Fascists hell!” Von Kármán called the development “the beginning of practical rocketry in the United States.” The success of the A20-A test earned the group another budget increase—from $125,000 in 1942 to several times that amount for the coming year, an incredible amount for the work of a few men. However, it was only one area into which the military was channeling large amounts of money in preparation for the war. Designated XLR-1-AJ-1, over 100 slightly modified liquid JATO units were sold by Aerojet for use on Boeing B36 bombers during the war. Smaller units were also used to help launch Corsairs from aircraft carriers; it is unclear whether they used liquid or solid fuel.

  Observing the tests was Alfred Loedding, sent by the Army Air Corps from Wright Field. Loedding's later claim to fame was as the military's first UFO investigator in 1947: he started Project Sign, which sought to explain away all UFO reports and was the precursor to the Air Force's better-known Project Blue Book.