Strange Angel (28 page)

And not a moment too soon. Thrown headlong into war, the navy and air force (formerly the air corps) now jacked up the workload on the rocketeers. Rather more “oomph” was going to be needed than that which propelled the paper-light Ercoupe into the air. They wanted to see 100 solid-fuel JATO units produced, each of which was to deliver 200 pounds of thrust—as opposed to the previous 24 pounds—for 8 seconds. There could be no explosions. If these units could be perfected, then JATOs would prove an invaluable resource for heavily laden fighter planes taking off from aircraft carriers in the Pacific.

The rocketeers were slightly apprehensive about these new demands. As Walter Powell, a new member of the growing rocket team, remembered, up until this point “they'd barely squeaked through without blowing up anything.” Indeed, Parsons' fuel—GALCIT 27—was still far too volatile for navy requirements. The success of the Ercoupe tests had in a large part been due to the swift creation and transferal of the JATO units from laboratory to air field. If, however, Parsons could solve the fuel problem, the rocketeers could provide the hundred experimental rockets to the navy while putting their new company in an excellent position to mass-produce and sell more of them.

Hazards, gambles, ventures had become part of everyday life for the group over the years, and they had become as inured to the vagaries of chance as a Greek chorus. Despite the obvious risks, Parsons, Forman, Malina, Karman, and Martin Summerfield each agreed to invest $250 of their own money into starting the company—a considerable sum for students, a teacher, and some rocket tinkerers. All the inventions, techniques, and shortcuts the group had used in their revolutionary work, all the patents they had filed, now became assets of the company, with the founders sharing the stock among themselves.

One of their first decisions was what to call the company. Anything with the word
rocket
in the title was still likely to be dismissed as a joke. When Kármán suggested “Superpower,” it was rejected as being too close to “Superman,” and, of course, comic book associations of any kind were to be avoided. After much discussion, the Aerojet Engineering Corporation was founded. The purpose of the business was painted in rather broad strokes in the certificate of incorporation: “To design, develop, experiment with, introduce, manufacture, assemble, build, repair, maintain, operate, lease, let, purchase, sell and/or generally deal in and deal with mechanisms, devices and processes now known or which hereafter may be developed, discovered or invented for the propulsion of airplanes and all other kinds of vehicles, projectiles of all kinds and description, or any other machine, apparatus, device or object requiring motive power whether for purposes of commerce, warfare, pleasure or otherwise.” No exact products were specified, because as yet there were none. The corporation opened offices on East Colorado Street, in the ground floor room of a former Vita-Juice plant. Helen Parsons planted flowers outside it.

No one trumpeted Aerojet's creation. The headlines of the newspapers the next day spoke of a war department report on the bombing of a Tokyo cruiser, a Nazi spy being sentenced to five years in prison, General MacArthur's promise to wrest back the Philippines, and the plan to transform the Santa Anita racetrack into a camp to hold Japanese and Japanese-Americans who would be forcibly resettled from Los Angeles. Aerojet did not even make the business pages.

The relationship between the new company and the GALCIT project was rather incestuous. Although Parsons and Forman officially went to work full time at Aerojet in order to draw wages, they made frequent visits to the Arroyo, just as Malina and Martin Summerfield regularly visited the Vita-Juice plant. But while the GALCIT Rocket Research Group had now begun to attract Caltech's academic elite—graduates and professors—Aerojet was finding it rather harder to entice suitably qualified workers to help prepare the company for business. Many of the most experienced engineers working for the big aircraft companies laughed outright when they heard of Aerojet's plans, advising the rocketeers not to go fooling with that “Chinese stuff.” Unable to entice seasoned engineers to join them, Aerojet did what the Rocket Research Group had done six years before: It turned to the young, bright, and untested. Indeed, Apollo Smith, who had been at the first firings in the Arroyo back in 1936, was lured back to act as chief engineer of the company at the age of twenty-seven. What these engineers lacked in experience they made up for in imagination, and they were more than willing to stretch the rules.

Despite their willingness to disregard convention, many of the young scientists were not quite prepared for the unorthodox working style and perilous “anything-goes” atmosphere that Parsons and the Suicide Squad fostered. With the exception of Kármán and Haley, all the founders were younger than thirty. When they showed up for work, which could be at any hour, they were usually a startling sight. Whether it was Ed Forman arriving, cut and bloodied after his most recent motorbike crash, or Parsons reciting poetry to the secretaries, causing squeals of delight on his every appearance, the company's core scientists seemed not so much unprofessional as insane. One young scientist, Bill Zisch, was so fearful of his future at a company run by such eccentrics that he developed an ulcer from worry. Even Kármán, then president of the company, admitted that during this time Aerojet relied equally on the founders' innate talent for invention and a large amount of verve and momentum—what he called “
Schwung.
“

Such qualms were partially soothed by Andrew Haley. While Parsons worked on improving the JATOs, Haley began traveling coast-to-coast to drum up business for the fledgling start-up. When he was in Washington negotiating with the military agencies in order to fill the company's ever empty coffers, he would send two-hundred-word telegrams back to Pasadena, urging the Aerojet staff in epic tones to “drive night and day with indomitable purpose and inspired leadership.” Even his wires, though, were occasionally tinged with the sense of panic that infused the company: “This is the crossroads, with all our reputations at stake.”

The shirtless rocketeers back in Pasadena laughed at Haley's rhetoric; they joked that the G in Andrew G. Haley stood for “God.” But all shared a sense of urgency during the first formative months of the company. None felt it more keenly than Parsons. His excitement at the great successes of the Ercoupe and A-20A tests had been tempered by the continuing explosions caused by his solid fuels. The solid-fuel JATOs were intended to be Aerojet's first product, and they did not even work properly.

Parsons had established that the GALCIT 27 propellant used in the Ercoupe tests was susceptible to temperature change because of the ammonium nitrate in the mixture. When too cold the nitrate shrank and when hot it swelled, fracturing the solid mass of the propellant charge in the motor. Parsons tried replacing the ammonium nitrate oxidizer with guanidine nitrate, which was not as sensitive to changes in temperature. The mixture, now GALCIT 46, was subjected to twenty-eight days of accelerated temperature changes: For 12 hours the fuel was kept at 100 degrees Fahrenheit, followed by 12 hours at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Thirty percent of the units still failed. It was an improvement over his more volatile earlier fuels but hardly one which the armed forces would find acceptable. All the variants of conventional black powder seemed to have the same drawbacks. He had to conclude that powder itself was the problem.

Parsons had reached the evolutionary dead end of black powder research. Centuries of tinkering and mixing, of pestle and mortar, of crucible and fire arrow, had left him with a two-foot-long metal tube stuffed with a powder that would explode if left in the cold for too long. It seemed that Goddard and the American Rocket Society had been right—there was no future for black powder rockets. But Parsons insisted on moving forward, perhaps driven by his
Schwung,
or perhaps motivated by the sheer inability to admit that anything was impossible. There was something elemental and primeval about powders, something about their very archaic nature that had always appealed to him, but he knew he had to leave them behind. If the rockets were to fire correctly, something entirely new was needed.

Nothing was to be ignored; nothing was to be ridiculed. Parsons even visited numerous other amateur rocket enthusiasts across the country in the hope of gaining inspiration. On a visit to New York in May 1942, he had watched a particularly poor rocket firing on the banks of the Hudson River. In a letter back to Frank Malina, he was merciless in his assessment:

His apparatus is crude + he works under considerable disadvantage ... At the start, his valves were leaking, + there was a considerable fume ... Then, as he tried to shut off, the valve stuck, + acid, benzene, fire, etc, raised hell in general. There was no great damage, but that was the end of the test. His measuring apparatus is primitive, and I believe his records are meaningless. He is absolutely foolhardy placing himself + all observers on top of the apparatus, with no protection ... He claims to hold 6 secret patents.

From the comical explosions to the “foolhardy” safety procedures, the letter appears as an almost exact blueprint of the way Parsons himself had worked in the early days of the Suicide Squad. Nevertheless Parsons and his colleagues were now bona fide leaders in their field.

Whatever he thought about the working practices of the novices he visited, Parsons would never entirely transcend the essence of amateurism inherent in his own character. It showed itself not only in his chaotic working practices but in his evident joy in the work he was doing. Despite all the military funding the work had gained, he was still pursuing rocketry with an uncomplicated and eager curiosity. He made up for his lack of theoretical and mathematical schooling with his prodigious memory, broad experimental knowledge, and, most importantly, his ability not to be dissuaded by conventional thought. Black powder would never be a suitable rocket fuel. But the armed forces wanted a solid-fuel JATO. When is a solid fuel not a solid fuel? It was a question that Parsons answered with an Archimedean “Eureka!” As Malina affirmed, it seemed that suddenly, as if by the addition of some ingenious ingredient, “all the various stuff that was in the back of Jack's mind, jelled.”

Like all legends the story of his discovery is hazy. Martin Summerfield thought Parsons came by it while driving up to the rocket project; Frank Malina thought it might have come after “communing with his poetic spirits.” Others have suggested that it was a collaborative effort between Parsons and Fred Miller, a mechanic, or Mark Mills, a Caltech graduate attached to the project. The most commonly repeated story is that Parsons was walking near the test site when he saw some workmen spreading heavy black asphalt across a roof. The smell and sight of the asphalt seems to have activated his encyclopedic knowledge of myth and historical literature and turned him to thoughts of “Greek Fire.”

Greek Fire was a terrifying flaming liquid weapon, the existence of which had been recorded in Sparta as early as 429
B.C.
It was most famously used by the Byzantine Empire under the reign of Constantine Pogonatus (
A.D
. 648–685), whose armies employed the strange burning substance to great effect in their sea battles against the Saracens. The Byzantine sailors would mount bronze tubes onto the prows of their galleys, which emitted jets of liquid fire that set enemy ships alight. The Greek Fire was a potent psychological as well as a practical weapon; it was reputed to be inextinguishable and burned even on water. Because of its devastating effect, the exact nature of its composition was kept secret, passed down from emperor to emperor. For the ensuing millennia Greek Fire remained one of the great unsolved mysteries of chemistry.

Over the years a number of theories about its ingredients had been advanced: liquid petroleum, quicklime, saltpeter, sulphur, or—most pertinently to Parsons—naturally occurring asphalt. As he stood there, watching the tar being poured, science collided with the romance of ancient history in his unorthodox mind: “Why not get rid of black powder altogether and use asphalt as the fuel?” he suddenly thought.

Parsons rushed back to his laboratory and began work. He melted some common roofing tar to liquid point, then added potassium perchlorate, an oxidizer that allowed the tar to breathe and flame. After mixing, he cast the boiling glutinous substance directly into the rocket chamber, bouncing the casing lightly to fill every possible gap in the motor. Once cool it looked like hardened paving tar, a tough, slightly plastic charge with no cracks in it at all.

The idea of using asphalt instead of black powder overturned centuries of previous thought. Parsons' innovation was strange enough to have come straight from the pages of a science fiction story: A modern-day scientist battling to produce a new fuel is inspired by a mysterious 1,500-year-old combustible to fire a space-age rocket! GALCIT 53, as the mixture became known, performed excellently under tests. It could be stored indefinitely, and it took only five minutes to pour it into a unit, a huge improvement over the laborious forty-five minutes it took to pack a rocket motor with GALCIT 46. Not only that, but it was much safer to handle.

With GALCIT 53 Parsons invented the castable fuel, a whole new category of rocket fuel. It caused a paradigm shift in the world of rocketry, making solid propellants suddenly much safer and immensely more practical. It was, said Malina, one of “the most important discoveries in the long history of solid rockets.” The results of Parson's thinking would eventually play a central role in American rocket technology. During the next half-century, GALCIT 53's plasticized descendants would be used to fire the Polaris, Poseidon, and Minuteman intermediate-range ballistic missiles halfway around the world at supersonic speeds. Most poignantly of all, the booster rockets that thrust the space shuttle into space are modeled after Parsons' invention. Although he would not live to see his dream of space travel come true, he was essential to making it a reality.