Word: aerojet
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...Aerojet was founded by Dr. Theodore von Kàrmàn, onetime boss of Caltech's famed Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, who currently splits his time as Aerojet chief consultant and chairman of NATO's aeronautical advisory council. Just before World War II, the Air Force asked him to work out a way to help overloaded bombers take off from short runways. Von Kàrmàn's solution was the famed JATO rocket-booster unit. The only trouble was that the company lacked the capital and the production know-how to follow through...
...Atoms. What saved the company in the postwar planemaker's famine was the same thing that made it grow in the first place: new ideas, plus topflight research into new fields. Gradually extending its contract to 87% ownership, General Tire gave Kimball the funds he needed to push Aerojet into liquid engines for some of the first U.S. military rockets: Douglas' early Nike, the Lark and Loon for the Navy. Aerojet branched out to work on underwater rocket engines, set up separate departments to pursue both liquid-and solid-fuel engines...
With Korea, the company zoomed. At its Sacramento plant, everything doubled; the cafeteria seating 450 workers was doubled soon after the original building was occupied; so was the solid-fuel engineering building. Entire new divisions were formed, and flourished. Example: Aerojet's Architect-Engineering Division, formed in 1947 to serve specialized needs, was called upon to serve as structural engineer for the rocket test station at Edwards Air Force Base on a $2,000,000 contract. It went on to a similar job at the Navy's missile test station at Point Mugu, Calif., the Army...
Today, though rockets for the Titan and Polaris missiles still account for the bulk of Aerojet's business, the company is moving fast across the whole spectrum. It formed an Astronautics Laboratory in 1956 to pursue abstract proposals for space flight, acquired two small companies to get ideas and lab space. An ordnance engineering division was set up to explore automation. A third new division, Aerojet-General Nucleonics, is about the most successful of all. Founded two years ago to study the application of nuclear energy to rocket propulsion, it soon went far beyond. The division, says President Kimball...
President Kimball and his executives make no bones about the fact that all this research comes high. In its 16 years Aerojet has paid only one common-stock dividend. All the rest of the profits go for research in a ratio that holds company expenditures to 30% for production and 70% for research each year. Eventually, probably by 1960 when Titan and Polaris are in production, Aerojet will pay its stockholders regular dividends. But never so much that it cannot lay a big bet on any exciting new field that opens...