GALCIT Rocket Research Project

The GALCIT Rocket Research Project was a rocket-development group at the California Institute of Technology, named for the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT) and led by the graduate student Frank Malina. Its core members were Malina, Jack Parsons and Edward Forman, joined by the Caltech students Apollo M. O. Smith, William Bollay, Qian Xuesen (then H. S. Tsien) and the meteorology student Milton W. Arnold.¹

Formation

According to a history by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's historian, Erik Conway, the group formed after Bollay's public lecture on German rocket-plane work drew Parsons and Forman, Pasadena residents who had been conducting their own experiments, to Caltech; Bollay referred them to Malina, and the three became known at Caltech as the "Suicide Squad."¹ A paper by Stephen Doyle and Michael Ciancone dates the meeting of Malina with Parsons and Forman to 1935, and records that because neither Parsons nor Forman had a college education they could not be appointed to the Caltech faculty, so Malina and Theodore von Kármán agreed to an informal, non-reimbursable arrangement.² Weld Arnold, who supplied $1,000 in small bills, never told the group where the money came from, and they did not ask.¹

The first test firing, of an alcohol and gaseous-oxygen motor, was held on October 31, 1936 (Halloween) in the Arroyo Seco above Devil's Gate Dam. A rocket-fuel leak later rusted equipment in the Guggenheim building and a thrust balance mounted on its outside wall exploded. Conway writes that the group kept working on campus until May 1938, when members took outside jobs.¹

Army Air Corps funding

Colonel Henry H. "Hap" Arnold of the Army Air Corps visited GALCIT in spring 1938 and asked the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Air Corps Research, on which von Kármán and Caltech's president Robert Millikan sat, to fund rockets for short-runway takeoff. A $1,000 grant arrived in January 1939 and a further $10,000 in July 1939, after which the group was designated GALCIT Project No. 1.³ On August 12, 1941 Lieutenant Homer Boushey made the first jet-assisted takeoff (JATO) in an Ercoupe at March Field, and in April 1942 JATO rockets lifted a 20,000-pound Douglas A-20 bomber.³

Because Caltech permitted faculty to run outside businesses, von Kármán and Malina incorporated Aerojet in Delaware on March 19, 1942 with the attorney Andrew Haley, Martin Summerfield, Parsons and Forman. Parsons and Forman went to Aerojet; the remaining original members left rocketry.³⁴ Malina remained treasurer of Aerojet while directing GALCIT Project No. 1. An FBI report of 1942 listed him as assistant professor of aeronautics at Caltech, cooperative agent of the Soil Conservation Service and secretary and treasurer of Aero-Jet Engineering Corporation.⁵

Security investigations

The Los Angeles office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened an internal-security inquiry on Malina in 1942. A report of that year recorded that a confidential informant (T-2) stated Malina, "Director of Gal-Cit Project No. 1, an Army Air Corps restricted project," had passed out Communist literature to fellow workers and had held Communist meetings at his home every Tuesday night until about June 1941. Informant T-1, interviewed November 4, 1942, said Malina had been associated with "pinks" at Caltech and attended meetings at which Karl Marx and John Strachey were studied, but that he was "solidly behind the war effort." Informant T-6 said he had no definite information on party membership but had observed that Malina was "a great believer in Russia." The report also listed Malina's resignation of his Army lieutenant's commission, accepted June 26, 1942 because he was classified as a key faculty member, and an affidavit by the Guggenheim Laboratory's director that Malina was in charge of research "of vital importance by the United States Army Air Force."⁵

In 1950 the FBI's Tsien file recorded Informant T-2 as stating that Tsien had joined Professional Unit 122 of the Communist Party in Pasadena in late 1938 under the party name John M. Decker, and that Malina belonged to the same unit under the party alias Frank Parma.⁶ Parsons gave a signed statement on January 11, 1950 that the group which met at Malina's house in 1938 and 1939 included Tsien, Sidney Weinbaum and the Dubnoffs.⁷ The FBI file on Parsons records that in 1950 seven GALCIT Project No. 1 reports of 1941 to 1944, classified Confidential, were found in his possession; the Jet Propulsion Laboratory told the FBI that three were still classified confidential and that all could be downgraded, and a report to the FBI stated that security regulations at the laboratory had been lax and that there was no charge-out system.⁸

Parsons, Tsien and Malina each came before federal prosecutors between 1950 and 1952. The FBI's summary of the Tsien case states that the U.S. Attorney declined to prosecute Tsien for espionage and for theft of government property over books and papers seized by Customs in August 1950. The U.S. Attorney's office declined to prosecute Parsons on October 25, 1951, and obtained a sealed indictment of Malina on December 30, 1952 for failing to disclose former Communist Party membership on security questionnaires.⁶⁸⁹

Becoming JPL

Conway records that GALCIT Project No. 1 officially became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in June 1944, with von Kármán as chair of its executive board.³