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.