Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a laboratory of the California Institute of Technology in the Arroyo Seco at Pasadena. Its historian, Erik Conway, writes that GALCIT Project No. 1 "officially became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in June 1944," remaining a Caltech organization though not yet a division of the Institute, with Theodore von Kármán as chair of its executive board.¹ The project's history is given at GALCIT Rocket Research Project.

Army period

Frank Malina drew on Caltech faculty and outside hires: the electrical engineer William Pickering set up guidance and controls, the aeronautics professor Louis Dunn became assistant director and later director, and Homer J. Stewart headed research and analysis.¹ The laboratory built three series of complete rockets: the Private (about eight feet tall, range about ten miles, first complete rocket), the WAC Corporal (first fired October 11, 1945 at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico) and the guided Corporal, which the Army in 1950 asked to be made a deployable nuclear-weapon system; in May 1952 the Army ordered 200 Corporal missiles.¹ Conway records that Malina and Qian Xuesen enlarged some of the Private's fins into wings, with unsuccessful results.¹ The Sergeant contract followed in 1954, shortly before Pickering became the third director.¹ The laboratory worked with the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Redstone Arsenal, where Army leaders had settled Wernher von Braun's group, and the launch of Explorer 1 took place at about 2:00 a.m. on February 1, 1958.²

Security cases of 1950 to 1952

The laboratory's staff and records appear in the FBI files of 1950 to 1952.

The FBI's Los Angeles reports on Sidney Weinbaum, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee, record Informant T-2 as stating that he was a member of Professional Unit 122 of the Communist Party in Pasadena and its county organizer, and that Qian, then section chief at the laboratory, had been entertained at the Weinbaum home and had corresponded with the Weinbaums before Weinbaum's hiring.³ The report also notes that "as of a recent date" Weinbaum had been terminated from the laboratory; he was arrested for perjury on June 16, 1950, the same date on which the "denial of consent" to Qian dated June 6, 1950 was delivered to Caltech.³ Weinbaum was convicted.³

When the FBI recovered seven GALCIT Project No. 1 reports from Jack Parsons in December 1950, the laboratory advised the FBI by letter of December 29, 1950 that, in the present active sense, three were confidential, one restricted and three unclassified, and that all could be downgraded to unclassified; it stated that it had no authority to downgrade them because the Air Force had sponsored the research. The FBI recorded a statement that security regulations at the laboratory during Parsons's employment had been lax, with no charge-out system for reports.⁴ The Army's Counter Intelligence Division advised in 1951 that the work had continued under the administrative direction of the Army Chief of Ordnance and that some papers contained proprietary information of Aerojet and Thiokol.⁴

Malina, the laboratory's first director, was the subject of the 1952 sealed indictment described on his page.⁵

Transfer to NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, signed July 29, did not change the status of JPL or the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. Pickering and the NASA administrator T. Keith Glennan wanted the laboratory moved into NASA, the Army resisted, and JPL was formally transferred on December 3, 1958. Pickering said the principal consideration for Caltech was the opportunity to leave classified military research for space science.⁶