Strange Angel (23 page)

In desperation Parsons even tried an idea that Jack Williamson, the science fiction author, had put forward in his 1939 story of space travel, “The Crucible of Power.” The spaceship in the story consists of four separate parts or steps, described in great detail: “Each step containing thousands of cellules, each of which was a complete rocket motor with its own load of ‘alumilloid' fuel, to be fired once and then detached.” But when Parsons tried to build these multicellular solid-fuel rockets—pressing separate cartridges of fuel one after the other into the rocket chamber—either the cartridges did not light, or they lit all at once. (In fact, Williamson's story predicted this latter problem, which ultimately causes the crash that dooms his space travelers.)

“The new apparatus being designed is changed from day to day and the machinist is getting dizzy from instructions and counter-instructions,” wrote Malina to his parents, as he and the rocketeers worked at a frantic pace on “GALCIT Project Number One.” Explosions at Caltech were now par for the course. “We upset the whole campus. People will get used to it, I hope.” While eating breakfast at home one morning, Malina heard a huge explosion emanating from the Institute. “At first I thought it was our apparatus again. I looked at my watch and saw it was 8:30, which I was sure was too early for Parsons and Forman to be at work, and I was correct.” The explosion had actually been caused by improperly stored chemicals in the chemistry building.

It was time for Theodore von Kármán to lend his immense theoretical talents to the problem. In the spring of 1940, having listened for months to the unremitting sound of Parsons' test rockets exploding, Kármán spent an evening writing down four differential equations describing the conditions necessary for a slow burning fuel to work in a rocket. The next day Kármán gave them to Malina, saying, “Let us work out the implications of these equations; if they show that the process of a restricted burning powder rocket is unstable, we will give up; but if they show that the process is stable, then we will tell Parsons to keep on trying.”

Parsons' experimentation would now take a back seat to theory. Retreating into his study, Malina began analyzing Kármán's equations. Solving them would tell Malina whether their work was theoretically possible. In short, these four equations held the future of their research. Malina never mentioned how long it took to work out these equations, but they were by no means simple. As Dr. Benjamin Zibit, the historian of science has described, “The solution of the equations yielded an important insight: the direct relation between surface area of the burning propellant and the diameter of the nozzle throat. If the proportion of burning propellant did not exceed the capacity of the nozzle throat to channel the hot gas in a uniform flow, then burning would remain a stable process.” However, if the volume of burning propellant did exceed the capacity of the nozzle throat, no matter how hard Parsons experimented, he would never be able to create a stable fuel. Malina eventually emerged triumphant. Kármán's equations had proved that the process was inherently stable. Parsons just needed to find the right combination of ingredients to create a fuel of suitable strength capable of uniform burning.

Parsons leapt into his work with renewed vigor and Kármán settled back to listen to more explosions. It was long, hard work, but Parsons remained joyously optimistic. Overflowing with enthusiasm, he scrawled a poem on the back of a piece of Caltech stationery:

 

The path is hard and the night is long
And the way is bleak and weary
But my heart is high as [we] trudge along
(Tho the road is long and dreary).

 

He tried every possible variation he could think of—different powder mixtures, various loading techniques—while Forman came up with a vast number of differing motor and nozzle designs in which to test them. They had to find exactly the right combination of powder, loading technique, and rocket motor design.

At this point, however, the Caltech authorities declared that they had finally had enough. If this work was going to continue endangering lives and concentration, it was not going to be done on campus grounds. There was only one thing for it: back to the Arroyo Seco, where the Suicide Squad had begun their rocket experiments four years ago. Leasing six acres of the western bank of the Arroyo Seco from the City of Pasadena, the rocketeers set about building two or three ramshackle wood and corrugated-sheet metal buildings to work in. Over the next months Parsons traveled to the Arroyo hundreds of times, pains-takingly testing scores of different powder formulations in the rickety and ill-lit buildings. It was not a comfortable process. Wedged at the foot of the mountains, the Arroyo test site received few cooling breezes. Temperatures that summer were in excess of a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and the corrugated-iron sheds amplified the already stifling heat. Since the rocketeers were only separated from their test stands by a wall of used railroad ties—the cheapest of building materials—when the rocket motors fired, the temperature soared even higher.

The rocketeers were now testing three separate rocket motor apparatuses, and like battle-weary soldiers at war, they no longer thought of an explosion as dangerous but merely as inconvenient. In fact, they were becoming quite blase about the proceedings. “Today we made a test and had a nice ‘blow.' No serious damage, just about a week's worth of repair,” wrote Malina to his parents.

Parsons, bare-chested and sweating profusely, crammed himself into the tiny test buildings and sat taking notes from the instruments. How long did this powder burn? What was its maximum thrust? Most of the time it was hard to tell. The equipment being used was so basic that the only way to record data was taking photographs of the gauges in the midst of the experiment. The cameras were calibrated to take between one and four pictures a second. Unfortunately, since most tests lasted less than a tenth of a second, the photographs showed either nothing or the blur of a needle across the whole dial.

 

Finally, Parsons made a breakthrough. With a black-powder propellant of his own composition (roughly 72 percent potassium nitrate, 15.5 percent charcoal, and 12.5 per cent sulphur), he suggested loading the rocket motor using a mechanical press. The powder would be pressed down in small, one-inch increments at high pressure. It was a laborious job, but the process would limit the amount of space between the grains of black powder and thus insure steady burning. The steel rocket motor itself would be lined with blotting paper which would allow an even burn to proceed along the side of the motor. When they tested the setup, the burning proceeded down the length of the tube in a controlled and stable manner. It was the first time that such a restricted burning rocket had ever been made and “the group was jubilant.”

By June 15, 1940, GALCIT Project Number One was able to report a number of positive results to the army air corps. In addition to his success with solid-fuel rockets, Parsons had also managed to find an alternative oxidizer for his liquid-fuel rockets. The air corps had declared liquid oxygen too impractical for combat situations since it had to be kept at extremely low temperatures. After months of testing chemicals in open crucibles, Parsons had stumbled upon red fuming nitric acid, a solution of nitric acid and nitrogen dioxide better known as RFNA. It was by no means an ideal answer—it was highly poisonous and very corrosive—and Parsons' trousers and hands had been burnt yellow and brown from the toxic vapors it re-leased. Nevertheless, when combined in a rocket motor with fuel—a mixture Parsons had devised of gasoline, benzene, and linseed oil, among other materials—it provided a powerful thrust. The air corps doubled their solid-fuel rocket funding to $22,000 with the understanding that Parsons, Malina, and Forman would prepare flight tests, with the rockets actually strapped to an airplane, the following summer.

The extra money caused a spurt of activity which created new interest in their work, and the squad brought a few new faces on board. Martin Summerfield, a Caltech friend of Malina, added some mathematical clout to the group. A short, bespectacled boy from Brooklyn, New York, Summerfield had previously worked in the Caltech physics department, principally in optics, X rays, and infrared radiation. He had been Malina's roommate as well as a member of Sidney Weinbaum's Communist salons, and Malina saw that his open intelligence, not to mention his legendary absentmindedness, made him a suitable match. The rocket group also applied to the Work Progress Administration (WPA)—part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program—for help in constructing new buildings, and they were sent eighteen workers. Meanwhile, other graduate students from Caltech began to gravitate towards the group's experimental work in the Arroyo. Even Clark Millikan, the head of the GALCIT wind tunnel who had derided their work early on, was beginning to show an interest in the rocket's possibilities.

The rocketeers tried to attract some of the old Suicide Squad members back, but Apollo Smith turned them down, and Tsien was refused a security clearance because of his nationality. Working for the military had its own complications, and as rumors grew of the Nazis' interest in rockets, all members of the rocket group now had to undergo an FBI security check. The war raging in Europe and the rocketeers' military funding meant that their work had become strictly confidential. “We have to suspect spies under every piece of paper,” wrote Malina, half-jokingly.

Within only a couple of months, the project at the Arroyo had suddenly expanded to incorporate twelve full- and part-time workers, including the original rocketeers. A hierarchy was slowly emerging in the previously free-form group. Parsons was named head of the solid-propellant section and was put in charge of preparing JATOs for the upcoming field tests; Forman became head of the machine shop; and Summerfield was named head of the liquid-propellant section. Kármán was assigned the post of director and Malina was the group's chief engineer. The newly enlarged group faced a setback when floods hit the West Coast during the winter of 1940 and turned the usually dry bed of the Arroyo into a thundering river. Boulders crashed by the unprotected shacks, the torrential rain leaked into the explosive powder, and flooding prevented tests from taking place. “This isn't the type of problem that can be solved on order” wrote Malina. Unfortunately, by the summer of 1941, this was exactly what the group had to do.

 

Although the rocket work had spectacularly revived itself after its period of stagnation, Parsons' interest in the OTO had not been lessened by his new workload. Indeed, it had grown stronger as he immersed himself in the writings and philosophy of Aleister Crowley. He was initially rather coy about admitting his burgeoning fascination with the occult, especially his encounters with the OTO, to his fellow rocketeers. Nevertheless, the fact that he and Frank Malina had spent “an awful lot of time together” over the past four years meant that both knew of each other's philosophical proclivities. While Parsons was reading Crowley's
Book of the Law
and lectures on yoga lent to him by Wilfred Smith, Malina could be found poring over Darwin's
The Origin of Species
and
The Descent of Man.
“I was personally never sympathetic towards this interest of his,” Malina remembered; “I was suspicious of mystics in general ... I used to josh him a bit when he would pull out some of his exotic books, which I just couldn't take seriously.”

Many years later Malina recalled Parsons' growing obsession with magic: “He wasn't schizophrenic, but he had two domains which he loved; one was rocketry, where the dream was tangible—where the magic was not resorted to. Then he had a second compartment in his mind where magic fascinated him ... As far as I can remember talking to him about calculations on rocket design, there was no input from what you might say alchemy or magic. In other words he functioned in compartments.”

Yet if the two worlds did not overlap, they did share many of the same features in Parsons' mind. Both magic and rocketry had a basis in the imagination and in scientific method. What's more, both promised to satisfy Parsons' desire to escape the earth spiritually and physically. As he wrote to Helen in 1943, rocketry “may not be my True Will, but it's one hell of a powerful drive. With Thelema as my goal, and the stars my destination and my home, I have set my eyes on high.”

Though Malina was skeptical, Parsons was quick to invite other less doubtful friends to the house on Winona Boulevard. Perhaps in a final attempt to involve his good friend in his new enthusiasm, one of those he tried to interest was Malina's new wife. With Malina increasingly away from Pasadena, delivering updates on the rocket project to the army air corps on the East Coast, his wife Liljan, eighteen years old and an art student, was often left alone in Pasadena. The Parsons frequently invited Liljan over for dinner to keep her company. “[Parsons] was a nice looking man,” she remembered. “Kind of pompous though. He wore a regular suit with a vest, and I don't think I ever saw him without the vest. He liked good music, he liked poetry, he was very well read.” On one particular night that her husband was away, she received a call from Jack inviting her to a party at Winona Boulevard.

She recalled: “It was a huge wooden house, a big, big thing, full of people. Some of them had masks on, some had costumes on, women were weirdly dressed. It was like walking into a Fellini movie. Women were walking around in diaphanous togas and weird make-up, some dressed up like animals, like a costume party.” Soon she was watching a performance of the mass. “One of these women was rather short and dumpy, and she came out of the coffin and began to flit around in a dance, and I began to think, ‘this is really weird, really strange'...Then some young man appeared in a loincloth and I thought ‘This is just too much ... I have to tell Frank about this.'” When she did, Malina simply rolled his eyes and told her not to worry about it. “Jack is into all kinds of things,” he said. It was the first and last time Liljan went to one of the OTO parties.