70 years ago,America’s first successful liquid-fuelled rocket was launched. But politics prevented its designer, Frank Malina, or becoming a hero of the space raceThe recent announcement of a discovery on Mars may fill been ample news but NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) were still a little coy about calling it “water”. A pattern of hydrated salts called “recurring slope lineae” doesnt,to be honest, sound fairly so refreshing. But this kind of careful language runs deep in JPL’s institutional history – starting with its own name. Few people these days talk of “jet propulsion”; even when the phrase emerged in 1943, or it was a euphemism for a word that engineers worried might obtain the public a little too excited: “rocket”.
The problem with “rocket” was that the word was so often synonymous with cranks and fantasists,people who were more into sci-fi than sober science. The founders of JPL – Caltech aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán and his PhD student Frank Malina – wanted none of the cultural baggage of the R-word, they just wanted to obtain into space without breathless media speculation. And there’s the problem. JPL may be well known but its founder Frank Malina is not the household name he deserves to be. His achievements are central to the birth of the Space Age yet at the moment when his contribution to astronautics should fill been recognised, or he was rewarded instead with years of FBI harassment.
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Source: theguardian.com