Strange Angel (14 page)

When summer arrived, Parsons and Forman alleviated the strict regime of scrimp-and-save by launching some of their old black-powder skyrockets, just for the thrill of it. The serious-minded Malina was not entirely comfortable with his colleagues' lack of discipline, but he understood their restlessness. “Their attitude is symptomatic of the anxiety of pioneers of new technological developments,” he wrote dryly. But the launching of these rockets was also a release for Parsons; it kept his passion from being reduced to labor.

In August
1936,
the Rocket Research Group learned with some excitement that the hidden god of rocketry, Robert Goddard, was leaving his self-imposed exile in New Mexico to visit California and Caltech at the suggestion of his benefactor, Harry Guggenheim. Goddard had just released a report, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., entitled
Liquid-Propellant Rocket Development.
In it he spoke of the research he had conducted since the humiliation of 1919. It was blandly written, as if designed to douse enthusiasm, and when in guarded terms he revealed the staggering news that he had, in 1926, launched the world's first liquid-fuel rocket flight (the rocket had traveled 56 meters at approximately 60 miles per hour), he subsumed any excitement he might have felt in caution and suspicion: “I am rather reluctant to specify what heights I believe possible.” Nevertheless, for Parsons and other rocketeers his report was a revelation. Not only had Goddard hinted that he was well ahead of anyone else in the rocketry world, but his position as a responsible physicist backed by a national organization argued that rocketry should be taken seriously.

Goddard's meeting with Robert Millikan did not go well. Thinking of the coup it would be for his university, Millikan tried to tempt Goddard to move his research work from the desert to Pasadena and indulge in a little teamwork with Millikan's pantheon of scientific greats. Goddard turned him down point blank. Millikan did not push the matter, but he did ask Goddard if he would meet Frank Malina, who was working on what Millikan was now calling the Institute's own fledgling rocket project. The encounter was brief, but Malina managed to engineer an invitation to visit Goddard in his laboratory in Roswell, New Mexico.

When Parsons heard the news, he was thrilled. He drew up a list of technical questions he hoped Goddard would answer for him. “What jet velocities, efficiency, and energies did he get from solid fuels in steel chambers with Taper nozzles?...What was the most powerful and promising powder fuel which he investigated, and how did it compare with the liquid fuels, irrespective of difficulties of fuel injection?...Did he ever investigate nitrogen pentoxide, N205, or any other oxidiser besides liq. Oxygen?” But from the moment Malina arrived in the blistering heat of Roswell, the suspicious Goddard kept him at arm's length. Goddard showed Malina the test stand, but there was no rocket attached. As they toured the workshops, the components of Goddard's rockets stayed under tarpaulin wraps. When Malina asked about particulars, Goddard switched the talk to generalizations. Finally, as Malina's frustration became visible, Goddard showed him a pristine newspaper clipping. It was the damning
New York Times
editorial that had led to his self-imposed seclusion sixteen years earlier. Goddard still “appeared to suffer keenly” from its criticism. It was obvious to Malina that Goddard would never help the rocketeers. Conciliatory, Goddard suggested that Malina come and work for him when he had finished his studies at Caltech. By that time, however, Malina would have no need for him.

Though he had laid the foundations for the science of rocketry, the solitary Goddard was on the verge of being surpassed by groups of workers who could work faster and more flexibly than he could on his own. While Goddard was hamstrung by having to attend to every aspect of his rockets himself, the Rocket Research Group was already replicating, in miniature, the systematic division of labor that would characterize all later developments in rocketry throughout the world: Malina dealt with theoretical problems, Parsons and Forman with the practical experimentation. Goddard's genius cannot be denied. He was, for many years, the only American of any academic standing to push forward the idea of rocketry as a science. In its early days the Rocket Research Group (and the American Interplanetary Society before it) would continue to refer to and reenact his experiments as they sought to grasp the finer details of the science. But despite the fact that his work anticipated much of the technical detail of, among other things, the German V-2 rockets used in the Second World War, Goddard's unwillingness to communicate his findings with anyone else ultimately kept him from playing a much more important role in the history of rocketry. His failure to cooperate with others frustrated even the easygoing Theodore von Kármán who, in 1967, summed up Goddard's achievements: “There is no direct line from Goddard to present-day rocketry. He is on a branch that died. He was an inventive man and had a good scientific foundation, but he was not a creator of science, and he took himself too seriously.”

 

On October 2, 1936, Parsons and Malina held a party to celebrate their twenty-second and twenty-fourth birthdays. They were also celebrating the near completion of their first rocket motor after six months of designing and building. The first test would take place on October 31—Halloween. Although both Malina and Kármán stressed the importance of theory over experimentation, hard facts were now needed. The rocket motor tests would provide data that would help the team plot thrust-time curves, understand fuel consumption speeds, and discover what temperatures and pressures were occurring within the motor during the process. The tests would teach them the best way of injecting fuel into the motor, what the best shape of the rocket motor would be, and what type of exhaust nozzle would yield the highest performance.

Since no one knew quite how noisy, or dangerous, the tests might be, the rocketeers wanted to find a spot somewhere off campus. Parsons knew exactly the place—the still-wild northern reaches of the Arroyo Seco, near the ominously titled Devil's Gate Dam.

The group had recently attracted a new member as word of the unusual project filtered through the university. Apollo M. O. Smith, known by all as Amo, had just begun work on his MA at GALCIT. His unusual first name had come from his father who, obsessed with the classics and piqued by his unexceptional surname, had named all his children after characters from the Greek myths. Thus Apollo grew up in a household with sisters Diana and Athena, brothers Hermes and Orpheus, and the family dog, Cerberus. Smith flew gliders at high school and spent some time working on oil rigs as an adult. At Caltech he gained a reputation for eccentricity by wearing a pith helmet to which he attached a ventilator and a weather vane so that his head stayed cool. “It wasn't really my main interest,” he said of the rocket project, “but it sounded like fun.” He brought with him his refinery experience of pipelines and inflammables.

The day before the Halloween test, Parsons, Forman, and Malina spent hours driving back and forth between Los Angeles and Pasadena, picking up the pressure tanks, fittings, and instruments necessary for the experiment. By 3:30 on Saturday morning they were exhausted. They retired home to grab three hours of sleep and at dawn made their way back to Caltech to put the finishing touches to the rocket apparatus. Malina commandeered an institute truck to transport the apparatus, complete with one large tank full of methyl alcohol and one of gaseous oxygen. By 9:00
A.M.
Apollo Smith had joined them, as had Rudolf Schott, another Caltech graduate student, who had offered his services for the day if he could watch the experiment.

It was a thirty-minute ride into the wilderness along a road that soon turned into a dirt track. Parsons stood on the back of the truck, steadying the extremely explosive cargo as it bumped up and down on the uneven road. Just behind the Devil's Gate Dam, they spied the perfect spot on the dry riverbed below. With the truck perched precariously over the valley edge, they began the backbreaking work of lugging the tanks, pipes, and other equipment down to the valley floor. They filled sandbags with dirt and piled them high as a protective barrier. All the screws and pipe caps were checked to make sure none had shaken loose during the ride. By 1:00
P.M.
everything seemed ready. Bill Bollay, whose paper had instigated all this commotion, was on hand to watch the young experimenters, as were two more Caltech students with cameras who had turned up to record the scene. As the rocketeers slumped on the riverbed, worn out from their exertions, one of the students took a photograph of the group.

It is an iconic image and shows the relaxed informality of proceedings. Schott sits at the far left of the picture, seemingly exhausted, staring into the camera. Apollo Smith, wearing his ventilated pith helmet, reclines on one arm. Malina stretches out next to him, looking slightly irritated. Was it because of something Forman, who sits next to him, has said? Forman is chewing a reed and reclining contentedly, as if he has just made a remark that rather pleased him. Parsons lounges at the right of the photo, wearing his trademark vest, his legs resting on a piece of scrap wood. He smirks into the dust in front of him. Whether he is laughing at Forman's joke or pleased that he is finally getting to test the rocket motor is hard to tell. Certainly he was always happiest when experimenting.

At the center of the photo stands the product of their long hours, in all its diminutive glory. The rocket motor was affixed to a spring, then attached to a three-foot-tall stand, positioned so that the exhaust flame would shoot from a nozzle straight up into the air. Forman had crafted the motor, less than a foot long, from gleaming duralumin, a lightweight but strong alloy of aluminium, copper, and magnesium, often used by the aircraft industry and most likely “borrowed” from GALCIT.

Connected to this motor were four hose lines. One supplied gaseous oxygen, another methyl alcohol under pressure, the third water for the cooling jacket that surrounded the motor. The fourth monitored pressure inside the chamber. Malina and Parsons would measure propulsion by the amount of thrust the motor gave to the spring: As the thrust increased, the spring mechanism would be depressed in direct proportion to the degree of thrust generated. The thrust was marked by a diamond-on-glass dial under the motor chamber. A pressure gauge told of the force
inside
the motor. If it got too high, the rocketeers could turn off the fuel to prevent the rocket motor from exploding. But for all its intricacies the rocket had no spark plug to light the mixture. The experiment was to be started with a simple cord fuse running out from the motor.

Anticipation ran high. The rocketeers connected and thoroughly tightened the fuel lines running to the motor. Check valves, flow meters, and pressure gauges were put in place. The rocketeers and their witnesses positioned themselves behind the sandbags. Parsons lit the fuse and rushed back behind the sandbags as Malina and Forman turned the fuel and oxygen on. The supply tubes snapped taut as the liquid and gas flowed into them. But the rush of air coming from the tubes blew the fuse out of the motor. Now methyl alcohol began to bubble over the still-cold rocket. The rocketeers rose slowly from behind their sandbags and shut off the fuel and oxygen valves. After recalibrating the equipment and emptying the motor, they crouched once more behind the sandbags. Parsons now tied the fuse in place and hurried back. But again the fuse was blown free and the methyl alcohol flooded unlit into the motor.

The group's frustration was palpable. Months of work had gone into the engine and now they couldn't even light it. It was as if they had built a car but forgotten to add a working ignition switch. The two student photographers decided that they weren't going to see any action and headed back to Pasadena.

Once more the rocketeers got off their hands and knees and wandered over to the rocket stand, now drenched in methyl alcohol. Parsons gave the equipment a perfunctory rub down and tied another fuse to the rocket. He lit it and ambled back to the sandbags, expecting the fuse to be blown loose from the chamber again. And it was, high into the air. However, in falling it ignited some of the alcohol that still remained on the equipment. A yellow-orange flame burst off the top of the nozzle. Parsons spun around and the rocketeers stuck their heads above the sandbags. Their equipment was not firing; it was on fire. Just as they started to move towards it to dampen down the flames, one of the rubber tubes still carrying oxygen to the chamber snapped free from its connection to the rocket motor and swung into the path of the flame, blasting a wall of fire directly towards the unprotected rocketeers. To a man they turned and ran across the valley floor as the flames flared behind them. Eventually the check valves that were attached to the oxygen tank clamped down, and the methyl alcohol remaining on the set burned off. Gingerly, the rocketeers returned to view the damage.

It was not a pretty sight. The rubber hoses were melted, and the brass couplings that held the oxygen hose to the rocket motor had snapped off. The cooling water jacket was leaking, as was the base of the rocket motor's nickel-steel nozzle, and the nitrogen regulator used to force the fuel into the motor had given up the ghost. Parsons and the rest of the group were, however, grinning from ear to ear. If only the photographers hadn't left, they lamented as they dismantled the setup; now that would have been a picture!

While they had not been able to fire the rocket, the flames had rekindled their excitement. After all, they argued, the fuel line had operated perfectly, not to mention the life-saving oxygen tank check valves, and they were beginning to understand the pressure at which the fuel and oxygen should enter the motor. As they dismantled the apparatus to take it back to the workshop, they persuaded themselves that whatever its failings, their experiment boded well for the next trial. As Parsons had shown before, rocket experimentation was akin to an addictive drug. Even less than triumphant attempts left one breathless to improve the rocket and try again. “As a whole,” wrote an excited Malina to his parents the following day, “the test was successful.”