‘Foot soldiers’ in America’s space race

Earthrise. An enduring image from the early U.S. space program, the picture taken by one of three astronauts orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, on the first flight of the Apollo project to leave Earth’s gravity. Seven months later, two U.S. astronauts walked on the moon. Those of us old enough doubtless remember the suspense, the excitement, the nationally shared realization of huge accomplishments -- above all, the enormous pride in our technology, our astronauts and what they did. Twelve men walked on the surface of Earth’s satellite during six landings, the last in 1972. Three decades later, despite political nods in that direction, any continuation of manned space travel beyond Earth orbit remains an ill-defined goal.

M.G. Lord’s “Astro Turf” seems to have been conceived as a search for her father’s role in the early Space Age. Charles Carroll Lord began his career as a mechanical engineer doing detailed design work on farm equipment in the 1930s, then joined the aircraft industry during World War II. In the late 1960s, he was “a foot soldier, not a general” with Northrop, a contractor to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he worked on Mariner 6 and 7, unmanned spacecraft that flew by Mars and snapped pictures in the summer of 1969. Lord’s descriptions of her father’s career (he retired in 1971 and died in 1994) and her own experiences as a girl growing up in the young Space Age form a poignant backdrop to her account of America’s space program.

Having little concern for the science and engineering or the results achieved by the various projects, Lord instead focuses on the people who devised the machines and made things happen -- the “private life” of her subtitle. Apart from her personal history of life with her father, much of the book consists of two stories. The first evolves from the modest beginnings of JPL, which Lord recounts briefly but well.

In 1936, five young enthusiasts began testing small, liquid-fueled rockets at Caltech. These weren’t the first rocket experiments: Others had begun some years earlier, conducted most notably in Germany by Wernher von Braun and in the United States by Robert Goddard. Because of Goddard’s obsession with secrecy, the Caltech group devised what it needed without his help. Substantial funding was unavailable until 1939, when the group’s leader, a graduate student named Frank Malina, responded to a Convair aircraft company proposal to use rockets to help heavy aircraft take off. Convair decided against the Jet Assisted Take Off (JATO) project, but funds were soon provided by the National Academy of Sciences, the prospect of war being a great motivator. The research led to the founding of Aerojet Corp., which manufactured JATO units during World War II.

In 1944, Malina’s rocket project, known as GALCIT No. 1, was separated from the academic activities of Caltech and renamed the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (Lord errs on this point: GALCIT itself, the Graduate Aeronautical Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology, did not disappear.) Caltech operated JPL for the Army, developing rockets and missiles until 1960, when the laboratory became part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, although still run by Caltech. Malina, its first director, had briefly flirted with communism in 1939 and so fell victim to the FBI’s hunt for subversives. In 1947, he moved to France, where he worked for the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and later enjoyed a successful career as a kinetic artist. He died in France in 1981, never widely noticed for his part in the beginnings of the U.S. space program. Lord is clearly sympathetic to Malina, and seems to imply that greater achievements could have come from the Pasadena group had not massive official support gone instead to the developers of the German V-2 rockets that terrorized England during World War II.

Five days before Germany surrendered, Von Braun and more than 100 of his colleagues turned themselves over to a U.S. Army officer. The men who had developed the V-2 were soon installed at Ft. Bliss, Texas, and later at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala. The Army took steps to ensure that they did not stand trial for war crimes, including the use of slave labor at Peenemunde; others who had worked in the German missile program did not escape so easily. At the Alabama arsenal, Von Braun directed his compatriots, augmented by a large American force, in developing a series of increasingly capable missiles for the U.S. Army, with no participation by JPL, which was engaged in a smaller program. Then in 1957 came Sputnik. Von Braun, who had never lost sight of his goal to build a rocket to fly to the moon, missed no opportunity to make his case, describing his plan in, among other places, a 1952 issue of Colliers magazine. After Sputnik, the U.S. scrambled to counter the latest Soviet accomplishment. NASA was established, and the Apollo project was approved in 1961 with the goal of putting U.S. astronauts on the moon before 1970. When that goal was spectacularly reached, Von Braun -- who was in charge of the Saturn V, Apollo’s launch vehicle -- was a hero in many quarters, and he died a hero in 1977. His project manager for the V-2 and the Saturn V, Arthur Rudolph, met a different fate, giving up his U.S. citizenship and returning to West Germany in 1984, where he was exonerated of war crimes charges.

Could we have won the race to the moon without the help of the German V-2 veterans? What if Malina had been free to continue his rocket program with the enthusiastic support that Von Braun received? These “what-ifs” may be interesting to ponder but cannot be resolved -- nor does Lord attempt to resolve them. Such concerns are not a part of her story, which centers on cultural matters.

Apollo ended in the early 1970s -- just about the time that men in the space program were beginning to discover that women could do more than perform accurate computations and that the distribution of talent was not gender-dependent. The potential consequences of this conclusion were huge and viewed by many NASA men as threatening. Lord takes JPL as an example of a hidebound organization subject to influences outside the control of scientists and engineers. For this, the second part of her story, she selects two women who played significant roles at JPL at a time when its climate was not conducive to cage-rattling.

Marcia Neugebauer was the first female project scientist for a JPL mission; Donna Shirley became manager of the Mars Exploration Program and leader of the team that built Sojourner, the first Mars rover. Both acquired numerous bruises on thick skins. Shirley, in particular, freely (and loudly) questioned a few of JPL’s male-oriented practices. Neugebauer retired from JPL a uniformly respected scientist. Shirley, because she was an unabashed activist and had worked her way up to a position from which she could effect institutional change, not surprisingly gained a reputation as something of a troublemaker. She left JPL in 1998 and now directs a science museum in Seattle.

In telling their stories, Lord vividly captures JPL’s adjustment to contemporary society. This is perhaps the best part of her book -- combining the struggle over “gender parity” with the exhilaration of JPL’s many successes, including last year’s landings on Mars of the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Both still roam the surface of our neighbor world, sending back startling pictures and data on its composition and character. *