Science: Quiet Space Lab

Space flight is a quantum jump in technology. Behind its thunderous engines and jewel-like instruments lie thousands of jobs of research, each calling for patient, often frustrating experiments. Major U.S. center for this sort of basic work is a quiet laboratory nestled against the San Gabriel Mountains on the outskirts of Pasadena. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory does not build giant rockets or their engines. It specializes in the long-range research that makes them possible. If and when U.S. spacemen match and outdo the Russians, J.P.L. will deserve a major slice of credit.

Many J.P.L. experiments seem unspectacular. One lab is studying the behavior of solid fuels that will burn at the low pressure that rockets encounter at the outer fringes of the atmosphere. A huddle of men in blue smocks stare at a mirror next to a thick window set in a concrete wall. Reflected in the mirror is a 2-ft. object like an outsized bug bomb. For a few noisy seconds, a blue flame spurts out of the bomb, then turns to a wavering trail of smoke. “It chuffed,” says one of the men glumly. “That’s all for this one.”

But J.P.L.’s men are dealing with forces and conditions no man had dreamed of only a few years ago. This week it unveiled a new wind tunnel that pushes the air at the fantastic rate of Mach 9 (6,670 m.p.h. at 32° F.). It will be used to test the shape of future rockets.

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 working in more than no buildings.

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 and rode a bicycle between his room and Caltech—about twelve miles. He said: ‘Your guess is as good as mine as to the source of these bills.’ ” Arnold, who is now a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Nevada, still will not or cannot say where he got J.P.L.’s founding money.

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.

Prestige Saved. After the war, J.P.L. developed the WAC Corporal and its successor, the Corporal E. Long before the Russians fired their Sputnik, J.P.L. had designed and had ready the spinning, clustered upper stages for an Army Redstone that the J.P.L. men insisted would put up a satellite. But not until the Navy’s Vanguard fizzled on the sands of Cape Canaveral were they allowed to show what they could do—and redeemed U.S. prestige by flinging Explorer I into orbit. Since then, J.P.L.’s spinning clusters have launched three successful satellites, including the U.S. moon probe (Pioneer IV, which is now orbiting the sun).

In the 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 one of the leaders of the new space industry. J.P.L. does not mind; once something developed at the laboratory works satisfactorily, J.P.L. passes on to other things.

Million-Mile Radio. Since rocket test shots are almost useless unless the rocket sends information about its performance, J.P.L. was forced to explore the electronic labyrinth of telemetering. One electronic job led to another, and now J.P.L. products ride in nearly all U.S. satellites, reporting the magnetism, heat and cosmic rays encountered in the unknown reaches of space. Such information has grown so voluminous that J.P.L. has its own computer to interpret it. For tracking space vehicles far out in the solar system, J.P.L. has built a radio telescope 85 ft. in diameter in the Mojave Desert, which can track a vehicle 1,000,000 miles away.

Last year J.P.L. was taken over from the Army by the newly created NASA. J.P.L. still does specific military work, but its main job is basic and applied research to further the U.S. push into space. One laboratory investigates the behavior of fuels, plastics and other materials at temperatures simulating space’s icy cold. Long-range planners devise methods to map the far side of the moon. Biggest single project is Vega, the U.S.’s most advanced space vehicle. Expected to fly in about 18 months, the first Vega will use an Atlas D as its first stage. The second stage, powered by a General Electric X405 rocket engine, is intended to place a 2½-ton satellite in a 300-mile orbit. Later Vegas will have third stages fueled with a J.P.L.-developed mixture, hydrazine and nitrogen textroxide, and should be capable of putting a 500-lb. vehicle on Mars.

In spite of its glamorous mission, J.P.L. has no science-fiction atmosphere. Its researchers do not talk lightly about bases on the moon or armed satellites keeping watch on the earth. J.P.L.’s emphasis is on reliability, but sometimes one of its shots misbehaves. Then it issues no cheer ful announcement explaining how the failure was really a useful success. “It didn’t work,” say J.P.L. men, candidly. “We are upset about it.”

Cosmic-Ray Man. Part of J.P.L.’s technical proficiency and lack of press-agentry is due to its connection with Caltech. Another good part is due to Director William Pickering. Born in Wellington, N.Z. in 1910, the son of a pharmacist, Pickering went to Caltech to study electrical engineering, and stayed to join the faculty. He worked on cosmic rays under the great Robert Millikan, was head of the highly successful Corporal program, became director in 1950.

Pickering does not look the part of a space administrator. He is slight, diffident, gentle, softspoken. Says he: “The kind of thing we are working on here is how to get a rock off the moon and lay it on the President’s desk. That involves some very interesting engineering problems.” J.P.L.’s ambition is to solve those problems and get that rock before the Russians do.