From Rocketeers to Solar Sailors

So here’s young Frank Malina out of East Texas, slim and dark, mind quick as a prairie twister, studies engineering at Texas A&M; and makes ends meet playing fiddle in his daddy’s band for hick-town dung-stompers, and graduates in 1934, a Depression year.

When Caltech offers him a scholarship, his family is busted so flat that he’s got no way to Pasadena. So his college teachers pass the hat and durn near the whole town of Brenham, mostly Czech immigrants like the Malinas, scrapes together $300. Comes 1936 and Frank, after earning two Caltech master’s degrees--you ready for this?--decides that he wants to build a rocket. Not a spaceship to reach the moon--that might come later--Malina’s modest missile would merely haul instruments to plumb Earth’s upper atmosphere and measure cosmic rays at the edge of space. But when he tells his professor, Clark Millikan, son of Nobel laureate and Caltech president Robert Millikan, that he wants to write a doctoral dissertation on rocket propulsion and high-altitude rocket characteristics, the prof tartly suggests that Malina leave academia and find a job in the aircraft industry.

Forgive that man. It was 1936, only nine years since Lucky Lindy hopped the Atlantic, and those who set America’s science agenda saw rocketry as pulp fiction. Certainly no one would expect that fiddle-playing Frank Malina out of East Texas was destined to cross paths with three hugely eccentric characters--a Hungarian Jew, a

Chinese mandarin and a self-taught chemist --to give birth to the institution that has become mankind’s window for exploring the universe.

Malina, who had gulped down Jules Verne in Czech and had big dreams, did not give up. He went to Theodore von Karman, director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology and one of the world’s leading scientists. Sharp-featured and elfin, irresistibly charming, a confirmed bachelor perpetually suspected of seducing colleagues’ wives, amusing in half a dozen tongues, intellectually fearless, terminally curious, Von Karman liked to lie in wind tunnels to feel the air rushing over his body. A Hungarian descendant of Rabbi Judah Loew, the 16th century Prague mystic who is said to have created the Golem, a mechanical man brought to life with sacred writings, Von Karman was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1914. There he devised a tethered helicopter to replace observation balloons and redesigned Anthony Hermann Gerhard Fokker’s device so Austrian machine guns could fire through aircraft propellers. After earning wide recognition for pioneering the physics of flight turbulence, he came to Caltech during Hitler’s rise. Von Karman knew that German scientists were interested in rockets; he gave Malina a green light. In this uncharacteristically unwitting fashion, he ensured his own legacy.

Word of Malina’s project got around town, and Pasadenan John W. Parsons offered help. Parsons, unencumbered by knowledge of higher math or molecular processes, was a cookbook chemist obsessed with things that go bang. Tall, beefy, insouciantly handsome, he was a mama’s boy who hated authority and detested societal mores but gave no outward hint of the inner stirrings that soon would propel him to leadership of an unlikely cult.

Parsons and a childhood sidekick, mechanic Ed Forman, had tinkered with black powder rockets, and had backyards littered with craters to prove it. With Von Karman’s blessing--but no school funds--Parsons joined Malina’s project. Forman helped by turning Malina’s designs into hardware. Between jobs and studies, for months the trio prowled junkyards and used machinery shops, trying to patch together test equipment. Desperate for funding, Malina and Parsons set out to write a movie script about mad scientists building a moon rocket; they hoped to sell it to a film studio. They worked in Parsons’ kitchen until Malina realized that the bags, boxes, bottles, cartons, jugs, tubes and vials piled everywhere were filled with assorted explosives, combustibles and chemical accelerators.

Malina began designing a firing chamber and exhaust nozzles--tasks that, before computers, required laborious hand calculations. In October 1936, the first motor was tested in the Arroyo Seco, three miles north of the Rose Bowl. Fueled by a brew of gaseous oxygen and methyl alcohol, after a few false starts it burned for three seconds, until an oxygen hose burst into flame and began snaking across the rocky ground. The rocketeers scattered in panic. They returned to the arroyo on Nov. 28 and got the motor to run for 15 seconds.

In January 1937, an improved motor ran for 44 seconds, and Malina invited another grad student to join: Tsien Hsue-shen, among the first of a generation of Chinese to benefit from educational reforms. A voracious and far-ranging intellect, committed to modernizing his backward homeland, he presented himself as a mandarin, a regal presence who in public could not err or display weakness. He agreed to help Malina and another grad student with the critical equations for a more powerful engine.

Upon reviewing Malina’s written analysis of the experiments, Von Karman allocated campus lab space to the effort. Following a nitrous oxide leak, however, the group, now dubbed the Suicide Squad, was forced to move all equipment outdoors. Weld Arnold, a 40-ish lab assistant, asked to photograph the experiments. Told that there might be no more unless some funding was found, Arnold pledged to raise $1,000. The first $100, ones and fives, came wrapped in old newspaper; no one questioned the source, which remains a mystery.

Near the end of 1937, Malina, with the assistance of grad student Apollo Milton Olin Smith, published his first paper, “Flight Analysis of the Sounding Rocket,” which so impressed Von Karman that he sent Malina to New York to present it. With the right motor, Malina told open-mouthed listeners, a rocket could reach an altitude of 1,000 miles. Time magazine and the New York Herald-Tribune reported Malina’s speech, the Associated Press sent his photo to newspapers nationwide, and the Los Angeles Times editorialized for more rocket research. A reporter who observed test firings wrote imaginatively about rocket ships blasting off from the Los Angeles Civic Center.

In May 1938, a new motor with a graphite lining and copper exhaust nozzles ran for a full minute. But then the money did run out, and the group dissolved, briefly. A few months later, with Hitler rattling sabers in Munich, Army Air Corps boss H.H. “Hap” Arnold popped into Caltech to update himself on aeronautical research. Fascinated by what the Suicide Squad had achieved on a shoestring, he asked a National Academy of Sciences committee to give the lab $1,000 to study rocket-assisted aircraft takeoff.

In early 1939, Parsons and Tsien rejoined Malina. In June, the committee disbursed another $10,000. With a wary nod to the rocket-phobic, Malina’s group was later designated the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

*

On a sweltering summer day this year, a small team of scientists attempts the unimaginable: Working among the 150 structures on JPL’s 156-acre home in La Canada-Flintridge, they are dreaming of a voyage to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, a journey that would take the most advanced existing spacecraft tens of thousands of years. The JPL team hopes to design a vehicle to fly at one-tenth the speed of light, cutting travel time to less than 40 years. If such a journey seems unfathomable, consider this: These scientists and engineers are devoting their careers to a mission that won’t fly until long after they are dead.

It’s like the 15th century explorers who set out for the Americas, for Africa, says Dr. Charles Elachi, the ebullient but low-key Lebanese-born scientist who heads JPL’s Space and Earth Science Programs. They didn’t know, step by step, how they would explore new continents, he says, but they had the confidence that they would figure out ways to overcome the hurdles.

In the half-century since JPL’s genesis under Von Karman, Malina, Parsons and Tsien, JPL has grown into the jewel of the American space program. It is Earth’s leading center for robotic exploration of the solar system and the universe beyond--a place where scientists and engineers like Malina spin ideas that most people would dismiss as science fiction, then turn them into technologies, experiments and spacecraft. “You have to be kind of a rogue scientist, with harebrained ideas,” says Dr. Andrea Donnellan, a JPL geophysicist. “People here support that because they can see the value of an idea that may seem crazy elsewhere.” If such ideas can be related to one of JPL’s missions, “it may get cultivated.”

Donnellan’s most recent brainstorm: uses computers to process hundreds of Global Positioning System satellite measurements of fixed points on Earth’s surface. Backed by hundreds of sensors, the same system that allows motorists to determine their location on the map within a dozen yards lets geophysicists track daily movement of California’s fault lines by tiny fractions of an inch, data that someday may help forecast the probabilities an earthquake will occur.

Another JPL project, the Topex-Poseidon satellite, measures sea surface heights and ocean temperatures, providing a scientific basis for understanding the El Nino phenomenon that affects weather patterns worldwide.

With a planning budget of $1.315 billion for the year, some 5,000 employees and hundreds of on-site contractors, JPL is now close to three times the size of its Caltech parent, and with about 1,000 “JPLers” holding PhDs, it is arguably the world’s greatest concentration of technical brainpower. “One thing you see here is that nothing is impossible,” says JPL’s 63-year-old director, Dr. Ed Stone, a University of Chicago-trained physicist.

Starting with America’s first satellite, Explorer I, in 1958, most of the news of our solar system in the last 40 years has come from data obtained by JPL spacecraft. The twin Voyagers, launched in 1977, beamed back the first close-ups of the outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Other missions have found Venus’ hothouse atmosphere; mysterious reverse landslides on Mars (mounds of soil that appear to be climbing a crater rim); an ice-topped ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa; colossal volcanoes on Io, another Jovian satellite; Neptune’s Great Dark Spot, which boasts the strongest winds in the solar system, and hundreds of other discoveries. JPL engineers also built the Wide Field and Planetary Camera that enabled the Hubbell Space Telescope to peer deep into interstellar space.

Yet despite its successes, and occasional failures, until recently JPL had a history of spending vast sums on a small number of projects, a practice that brought criticism and uncertainty. “When I first came here, JPL was focused on survival,” says NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin, who took office in 1992. “They needed a big project every 10 years to feed them.” At the time, that was Cassini, a $1.5-billion effort that began in 1989 and went up in October 1997. Named for the 17th century French-Italian astronomer who discovered the gap in Saturn’s main rings and found four of its moons, the spacecraft will reach and explore Saturn’s amazing system in 2004. At JPL, Goldin found angst, with scientists wondering, “ ‘What comes after Cassini?’ And it was paralyzing them. Their programs were so expensive that running a thermal vacuum test or a shake test became a political event, and because they were so worried about failure, they would use old technology that was proven, instead of blazing a path like they are doing today and leaping ahead 10 years.”

Goldin would not have this. “Between 1980 and 1992, NASA’s budget doubled, but we had only two interplanetary missions,” he says. He issued a decree: “From now on, we do things faster, better, cheaper.” It has transformed the lab into the proverbial beehive, a frenetic place with “dozens of small- to medium-sized projects,” Goldin says, “where young kids who don’t even shave yet or haven’t combed their long hair are in charge.” Most of JPL’s 18 mission project managers, 24 experiment project managers and 10 pre-project managers are relative newcomers to these jobs. “The innovation is unbelievable. These boys and girls--there are none better.”

Among the dozens of projects now underway is an orbiting infrared observatory that would offer astronomers views of previously invisible phenomena. It is scheduled for launch in 2001. A 2003 mission, Space Technology 3, would place two concave mirrors in solar orbit. Deployed up to a kilometer apart and linked by computer, they would resolve star images up to 40 times better than the Hubbell, detecting the telltale star wobbles that suggest the presence of planets. The Terrestrial Planet Finder, a space interferometer scheduled to fly in 2010, would use this data to examine earthlike planets. Both are part of NASA’s Origins Program, aimed at learning how life has evolved in our and other solar systems.

The purpose of JPL missions also is changing. Stone carves space exploration into eras. The first was meeting the engineering and science challenges of getting to another planet, he says. Once we learned how to get there, the next era was finding what was out there. Now NASA’s “faster, better, cheaper” credo coincides with Stone’s third era of space exploration: bringing back to Earth samples of distant worlds. Stardust, launched in February to encounter the comet Wild-2 in 2004, will return some of its dust to Earth. Why spend megabucks on comet dust? Because comets--small, fragile, irregularly shaped mixtures of particles and frozen gases--are thought to contain the primordial material from which our solar system was fashioned. Stardust also will return samples of mysterious interstellar dust streaming into our system from the direction of Sagittarius.

While JPL has earned an exalted reputation for navigating billions of miles with split-second timing and surgical precision, spaceflight remains a risky business. In July 1962, when JPL attempted its first interplanetary voyage by sending Mariner 1 to Venus, the Atlas-Agena launch vehicle veered off course minutes after liftoff and had to be destroyed. The reason: A single hyphen had been omitted from a computer program. In 1993, JPL’s Mars Observer probe disappeared just before its scheduled rendezvous with the red planet. Engineers concluded that something probably went wrong while its fuel tanks were being pressurized, causing the craft to spin out of control. More recently, JPL’s once lengthy and detailed peer review process, streamlined by “faster, better, cheaper,” failed to note a critical oversight in the lab’s Mars Climate Orbiter. Orbiter’s mission failed in September as it neared the planet because contractor Lockheed Martin Astronautics sent data for the critical orbit maneuvers in feet and pounds, while JPL uses metric units. Nobody caught the error.

Another measure of JPL’s evolution is its technology-transfer program. In the 1930s, aviation pioneer Donald Douglas asked Von Karman for help designing the DC-1, forerunner to the famed DC-3. Von Karman’s analysis reduced drag and turbulence and enabled the aircraft to fly faster with less fuel. Also in the ‘30s, Von Karman had a “water wind tunnel” built to redesign archaic Metropolitan Water District pumps to bring water over the Tehachapis more efficiently. And in the ‘50s, a JPL group under Dr. Solomon Golomb, now a USC professor, sought a way to prevent enemy jamming of missile-guidance systems. The result was a digital coding system that became the basis for cell phones, commercial cryptography and radar.

Today JPL’s Dr. Merle McKenzie and a small staff seek commercial applications for new lab technologies. For example, Caltech, which holds JPL’s patents, licensed Ford to produce a “neural networking” computer chip to detect tiny variations in engines. Other JPL technologies have led to a collision-avoidance system for small aircraft, infrared ear thermometers, and digital cameras on a single microchip. JPL also rents out its formidable expertise. “We don’t do any work that could [be done] by another U.S. company,” explains McKenzie. JPL works only “in areas that are unusual and unique,” where the lab has special competence.

When a proposal is accepted, JPL is reimbursed for salaries, materials, facilities usage and other expenses. Even so, she explains, this amounts to a tiny fraction of what it would cost a company to do the work on its own, if it could find scientists and engineers with the right skills. McKenzie is looking now for private-sector partners to design and build an interplanetary Internet. JPL’s own contribution, taking shape in the next few years, is Web sites where earthlings can surf in to see what’s happening on Mars as it happens, with pictures from satellites and ultralight aircraft soaring over Mars.

*

JPL’s fourth era, in stone’s epochal view, will be building robotic outposts throughout the solar system so that instruments, imaging systems and local exploration vehicles can gather data. In his view, that will begin early in the new millennium. Someday there will be a fifth era, the era of leaving our solar system, of visiting the stars--and JPL already has begun to plan for it.

A few hours before Pathfinder landed on Mars on March 4, 1997, Goldin was at JPL to dedicate the Carl Sagan Memorial Wall on the lab’s mall. He recalls that a few JPL staff members “who were discomfitted with change, came up and said, ‘Hey Dan, why don’t we get another Pathfinder mission?’ ” Goldin recalls. “The blood drained out of my face. Been there, done that. We are not about repeating things.” Later, speaking extemporaneously at the ceremony, he challenged JPL to build and launch a probe that would travel 10,000 Astronomical Units (an AU is 93 million miles, the distance from Earth to the sun) into space within 25 years. In the audience, “three out of four were dancing on air--and a couple were gasping and wheezing,” Goldin laughs.

In the months ahead, Goldin’s notion evolved into a true interstellar mission, a probe to visit the sun-like stars nearest our solar system: Alpha Centauri A, B and C. All three may have planets. They are some 4.3 light-years (270,000 AU) distant, about 9,000 times the distance from Earth to Neptune, which is as far as any spacecraft has yet flown.

Early this year, Art Murphy of the lab’s Technology and Applications Program met with Sarah Gavit, manager of the Deep Space 2 project, a microprobe designed to penetrate the surface of Mars in search of water ice. Murphy reminded Gavit of Goldin’s interstellar ambitions and offered her the chance to oversee a study, the necessary precursor to a mission. “He said, ‘We need somebody to run this, to bring it down to reality, to make a real program out it, rather than just science fiction,’ ” recalls Gavit, 37. In her heart-of-hearts, says Gavit, “I thought, ‘You guys are nuts.’ Interstellar? Interstellar? Going where? Right.”

As an 8-year-old vacationing in Michigan, Gavit was playing kickball on a sultry summer day when her parents summoned her to watch television. She dutifully sat down to see grainy black-and-white images crawling across the screen. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” said Neil Armstrong. It was July 20, 1969. When the other kids returned to their game, Sarah sat spellbound. Later her family moved to Fort Meyers, Fla., and Sarah visit Cape Canaveral. After high school, she enrolled at MIT. Before graduating with a masters in aeronautical and astronautical engineering in 1985, she was an Amelia Earhart Fellow and co-led development of a five-person bicycle that attempted to break the human-powered land speed record. After receiving the James Means Memorial Prize for Space Systems Engineering, she went to work for Martin Marietta Corp. on Magellan, which JPL launched in 1989 to radar-map Venus. When Magellan was over, JPL hired Gavit for Cassini.

“Sending a probe to Alpha Centauri will require enormous advances in three areas,” Gavit explains. First, since it would take 4.3 years for light to travel between Alpha Centauri and Earth, communications with a spacecraft flying between them would be difficult. For that reason, any spacecraft must be able to repair itself, evaluate data from sensors, devise missions to suit this data and reprogram itself to execute them.

Interstellar voyages also will require vastly improved communications. JPL uses radio, which requires elaborate enhancement of incoming signals. Since radio and light waves obey a physics law, the inverse square rule, signals from a distance of two AU arrive with one-quarter the strength of those from one AU; from three AU they are only one-ninth as powerful. So radio or light waves from Alpha Centauri arrive with only 1/81,000,000 as much energy as they would from Neptune.

Enter Dr. James Lesh, 55, who has spent most of his 28 years at JPL studying lasers and now manages communications technology development. Intense and articulate, comfortable explaining complex scientific notions to the unschooled, Lesh personifies JPL’s workaholic, mission-oriented culture. When he goes home at the end of a long work day, he generally drags a thick briefcase along. “Going home for the weekend, I sometimes feel like I should be doing more; that might cause me not to do some big [household] project that I would if I felt totally free,” he says. JPL is full of people like him. Many times, working at home at 2 or 3 a.m., he has sent someone an e-mail--and gotten an instant answer. “There is an appreciation for those who are committed, who seem to live it, who have a passion for it.”

Lesh thinks lasers might be the answer to interstellar communication. “Voyager’s radio beam is about 1,000 Earth diameters wide when it reaches here,” he explains--and 20 billion times weaker than the power needed to operate a digital wristwatch. “If I take a fair-sized telescope and transmit visible light through it from the same distance,” says Lesh, “the spot size is about one earth diameter,” which translates to a million-fold increase in power concentration.

As daunting as the communications question is, the biggest problem with getting to Alpha Centauri is getting to Alpha Centauri. “At present speeds, if either Voyager were headed for Alpha Centauri, it would take 74,000 years to arrive,” Gavit says. So JPL has turned to Charles Garner, 47, whose lab moniker is “Mr. Solar Sail” because he is an expert at a once-mythical form of travel--sailing the stars on solar energy. “A solar sail is a giant, lightweight mirror in space,” Garner explains. Instead of catching wind, however, this sail is powered by photons--light particles--from the sun. Unlike chemical rockets, which burn for mere minutes, this sail will boost the spacecraft for months or years--but only if its sail weighs almost nothing. Garner thinks he has solved that with ESLI Microtruss, a three-dimensional material made of carbon fibers that are 10 times stronger than steel but 10 times thinner than a human hair and weigh less than one gram per square meter. Manufactured by Energy Science Laboratories in San Diego, the material will be covered with a reflective aluminum film. “You can support a square meter of this on your finger, yet you can bend it and it is so stiff that it will spring back on its own,” Garner marvels.

Gavit’s team, armed with these and a handful of other fantastic ideas, has proposed that NASA take an essential step toward funding an experimental interstellar mission by listing the project in its long-range Strategic Plan. Gavit’s group wants to launch such a mission in 2010 with a goal of reaching the heliospheric boundary--the line in space separating material from our sun from the material of interstellar space--by 2025. That means building a spacecraft to travel 15 AU a year, about five times as fast as any of the Voyager spacecrafts.

The 2010 mission envisions a spacecraft of just 220 pounds with a science payload of 55 pounds. To accelerate this craft to 15 AU per year requires a solar sail nearly five football fields across, but weighing a mere 270 pounds.

All this, however, is just a warm-up for a true interstellar mission. For that attempt on Alpha Centauri, Dr. Stephanie Leifer, an advanced propulsion expert, talks about a sail miles in diameter driven by an array of lasers more than 600 miles across. The system would power a payload of 2,200 pounds, including the sail, to a tenth the speed of light--many times faster than the most advanced propulsion system currently in use. But even this would require “more energy than is produced by human civilization in a month,” Leifer sighs. And even at a tenth the speed of light, a simple fly-by of Alpha Centauri would take close to 40 years.

“There are so many problems to be solved before we can even think of going to another star,” Leifer says. “People in the space program have been screaming about launch costs for decades. The reality is that we can’t conceive of a small interstellar mission. We don’t know how to build anything that tiny to go to another star.” Leifer thinks that before a true interstellar mission can be launched, NASA will most likely be able to put a base on the moon or on an asteroid, from which it could build the infrastructure to mine raw materials and manufacture the spacecraft. “This is really far-out stuff that it’s hard to imagine doing in the next 50 or even 100 years,” she says. “It would be really neat if I could live to see a lunar base or long-term human habitats in space, where people can live and work. Those are the kinds of things that excite me.”

Nor does Gavit imagine she will live to see an Alpha Centauri launch. “Maybe my nieces and nephews will,” she says. “When I first took this job, it wasn’t my first choice. One day when I was grumbling about something, my boss said, ‘Sarah, did you ever, in your wildest dreams think that you would be the first person to start an interstellar program for NASA?’ ” And then it hit me. And every now and then it just blows me away. Because I don’t do this for the money. I do it for the dream, to explore, to know more about ourselves. Ask any kid on the street: They’re full of dreams, they don’t know what can’t be done. And I don’t feel alone--not at JPL. I don’t know how we will get to the stars, but I think we can, that we will.”

*

Frank Malina, the student who started it all, did live to see his dream realized. As JPL’s chief engineer, he headed the effort to develop Army guided missiles. WAC Corporal, launched Oct. 11, 1945, at White Sands in New Mexico, soared to more than 205,000 feet.

Jack Parsons was not on hand to share this triumph; he left JPL in 1944. A year earlier, he had assumed leadership of the Agape chapter of Ordo Templi Orientis, a cult featuring priestesses rising from alters in diaphanous gauze to perform gnostic masses. Parsons dabbled with peyote, mescaline, marijuana, opiates and hallucinogens. In 1946, his friend, science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, documented a ritual, including frenzied copulation, which Parsons claimed evoked the “goddess Babalon [sic], mother of harlots.” Soon afterward, Parsons began using the name “Belarion Armiluss Al Dajjal Anti-Christ.” He died in June 1952 in a mysterious explosion, perhaps an accident--but maybe murder. Malina credited him, after Von Karman and himself, with the greatest contribution to JPL’s start. The crater Parsons, named in his honor, is on the moon’s dark side.

As a Caltech don and a premier JPL consultant, Tsien Hsue-shen was regarded by 1949 as Von Karman’s peer and probable successor. His blueprint for a passenger rocket linking New York and Los Angeles in less than an hour drew enormous media attention. Less than six months later, however, the FBI revoked his security clearance, suspecting he was a Communist. Angry, he made plans to visit his ailing father in Shanghai. Soon after, war erupted in Korea. His baggage was searched, and when classified documents--his own papers--were found, he was imprisoned as a spy.

He was released on condition that he remain in the United States; paradoxically, the INS began deportation proceedings. Despite the many scientists who vouched for his loyalty, in 1955 he was one of two prominent Chinese exchanged for U.S. Korean War POWs. He went on to become one of China’s most revered scientists, overseeing development of ICBMs, weather and reconnaissance satellites and the deadly Silkworm anti-ship missiles exported to Third World dictatorships. He lives near Beijing.

Von Karman, through his friendship with “Hap” Arnold and participation in World War II scientific planning, had a profound and lasting influence on the U.S. Air Force. At his suggestions, promising young officers attended graduate schools to receive rocketry training and the federal government committed to funding fundamental research. He was honored with America’s first National Medal of Science in February 1963, and he died a few weeks later at age 81.

After World War II, Malina grew uncomfortable with designing weaponry and with the national obsession for rooting out Communists. When the FBI began investigating Sidney Weinbaum, a Caltech professor and gifted musician, for Communist Party membership, Malina began to worry. With his wife, Liljan, Malina often had visited Weinbaum’s home. Along with enjoying music, they had discussed politics and the works of Communist writers. Before Malina’s security clearance came up for renewal in 1947, his home was searched by a methodical burglar who examined the contents of file cabinets but took nothing. Soon after, Malina left JPL and accepted a position with the U.N.’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, in Paris.

After a second marriage, he left the U.N. to create striking kinetic art and to found the arts magazine Leonardo. In 1959 he rejoined the world scientific community when Von Karman asked him to become part of the International Academy of Astronautics. As dean of American rocketeers, he roamed the world, speaking of rocketry’s origins and envisioning its future. He spoke eloquently of exploring our solar system--and of eventually journeying to the stars. He died in Paris in 1981.