America´s forgotten rocketeer

In the early decades of the 20th century, rocket science wasn´t considered the brainy endeavor it is now. Far from it: Simply expressing an interest in the field was enough to provoke ridicule. Becoming a rocket scientist was enough to get you ostracized from whatever field you were in before. Frank Malina didn´t care. Overcoming incredible institutional resistance and rather daunting technical and financial odds, the engineer, while still a grad student at Caltech in the mid-1930s, started up a research program that would lay the foundations for U.S. rocket and missile development. During the run-up to World War II, that work took on new significance. By the war´s end, Malina had become the top American rocket expert and had cofounded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which today is one of the world´s premier space research organizations. And yet, you´ve probably never heard of him. Most histories of the U.S. space program treat Malina and his group as a footnote. They say the real work started only after the war, with the arrival of Wernher von Braun, Hitler´s chief rocket scientist. Without the German´s genius,the story goes, U.S. extraterrestrial explorations would never have gone so far so fast.