Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...another month at least. The Atlas ICBM that was especially rigged to boost a 375-Ib. payload around the moon in early October blew up last week at Cape Canaveral during a static test of its engines. It not only destroyed itself but also the second-stage rocket perched on its nose, and wrecked the launching...
Small Beginnings. J.P.L. does little boasting, but it can lay proud claim to being the cradle of U.S. rocketry. Among other things, J.P.L. designed and produced the first successful U.S. high-altitude sounding rocket (the WAC Corporal in 1945), developed the first successful solid-fuel propellant, devised and built the guidance systems that have guided satellites into space, and the instruments that telemeter back what they find. Practically every U.S. missile program has called for its advice. Today it is run by Caltech as the prime deep-space laboratory of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, with 2,700 employees...
Like other famed rocket labs, e.g., Germany's Peenemünde, J.P.L. was founded by eager amateurs. In the middle 1930s, Aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman encouraged a group of Caltech students to design high-altitude sounding rockets. For a while they had no money except what they could spare from their own pockets, but in 1937 a meteorology student named Weld Arnold offered to raise $1,000. Says Dr. Frank J. Malina, one of the original rocketeers: "Arnold was a very quiet person who came and went in a mysterious way. He told me he lived in Burbank...
J.P.L.'s founders got a bigger boost in 1939. when the National Academy of Sciences came across with $10,000 to develop rockets for helping airplanes get off the ground. In 1941 the first airplane took off with a J.P.L.-developed JATO (Jet Assisted Take Off) rocket. During World War II, J.P.L. was reorganized as a laboratory run for the Army by Caltech...
...late 1940s, J.P.L. set a team to work looking for a solid fuel that would be used in long-range rockets. Requirements were that the fuel burn evenly, resist cracking under pressure, and be capable of insulating the thin shell of the rocket from the heat of its own combustion. They hit upon a polysulfide-a rubbery, sticky liquid that could be poured, solidified, then burned at a controllable rate. It worked, and is now the basis for the Navy's Polaris and all other solid-fuel U.S. rockets. The small company that made it, Thiokol, has become...