70th Anniversary of 1st Successful Rocket Test in Pasadena, California

wrote:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=1217

The Spark of a New Era
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
DC Agle, 818-393-9011
October 25, 2006

On July 4th of 2005, the hopes and dreams of the people of the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory rode on the precision of a single five-pound
rocket motor. Within one 90-minute span, the diminutive thruster had to
fire accurately three times to position the working end of NASA's Deep
Impact mission in the path of an onrushing comet. While the
comet/spacecraft encounter was unique, it was by no means the first
time
a five-pound rocket motor carried the aspirations of the Jet Propulsion
Lab. The very first time, JPL was not even called JPL.

Seventy years ago this Halloween, at 9 a.m., a truck from the
California
Institute of Technology turned on to a road owned by the Pasadena Water
Department and after heading down a small hill came to a stop. Its
tired
occupants - they had spent the night before preparing and had only
three
hours sleep - clambered out and began the laborious job of carrying
their cumbersome test equipment another 400 yards into the dirt and
scruffy brush of Pasadena's Arroyo Seco.

They were there in an isolated, dry, scrub strewn gulch three miles
north of the Rose Bowl to scientifically measure the thrust developed
by
one of the world's first liquid-fueled rocket motors. They were there
to
accurately calculate the efficiency of the motor. They were there
because, there, they most likely would not kill anyone - except perhaps
themselves.

The 'they' were Frank Malina, Jack Parsons, Ed Forman, A.O. Smith,
William Bollay, Carlos Wood and William Rockefeller. Malina was a
graduate student at nearby Caltech. He had read Jules Verne as a child
and considered propellers to be an unnecessary limitation to the
potential of aircraft. His associate Parsons was a freethinking
explosives expert who dabbled in pagan rituals and liked to keep
volatile rocket fuels in his home. And Forman was an area mechanic who,
like his friend Parsons, liked to see things go boom.

Forman and Parsons met Malina through Caltech professor Theodore von
Karman. Although both Parsons and Forman's education ended at the high
school level, their enthusiasm for the new field of rocketry won over
von Karman. But the methodical professor realized the young duo's 'kick
the tire and light the fire' attitude had to be tempered. To achieve
breakthroughs in rocket propulsion, von Karman appreciated, would
require a healthy respect for the scientific method. He pointed them in
the direction of Malina, who was also quickly won over by their
passion.
In February 1936, Malina requested the two assist him in his doctoral
thesis on rocket propulsion.

Nine months of hard work later, Malina, Parsons and Forman were
standing
in the dusty gully in the Arroyo Seco with Smith, Bollay, Wood and
Rockefeller - all inquisitive, aeronautically-minded Caltech graduate
students willing to break a sweat.

By one in the afternoon the now sweaty septet had had their fill of the
lugging and assembling of heavy cylinders, gauges and hoses. Before
them
stood a nearly five-foot-tall rocket motor made of duralumin,
surrounded
by a water jacket to keep the combustion chamber cool. It was pointed
skyward and, when firing, the plan was it would push down on a diamond
tipped arm that would scratch a clock-driven glass drum, providing the
experimenters with an accurate assessment of the motor's thrust. All
this was attached by a series of rubber tubes to a melange of valves,
flow meters, pressure regulators, pressurized bottles of fuel and
oxidizer, and surrounded by sandbags.

Nine months of work led to this moment. Most in attendance huddled
behind a wall of sandbags. A few took refuge behind a nearby trash
dump.
All waited anxiously. A lit fuse quickly covered the distance between
sandbag and rocket. It entered the rocket chamber and then - nothing.

After confirming it was relatively safe to approach, the team gathered
by the rocket engine and attempted some on-scene analysis. Soon after,
two more attempts led to the same humbling result. Prior to the fourth
and final attempt of the day the team made a modification to the fuse.
The fuse was lit. When its flame entered the combustion chamber the
regulators for gaseous oxygen and methyl alcohol were opened.

Ignition.

A foot-long plume of fire rose from the engine's nickel-plated nozzle
only to be quickly snuffed out when the oxygen hose broke loose. Our
intrepid rocket pioneers ran for the hills as the hose snaked across
the
ground spouting flame. When the coast was clear they compared notes.
They agreed the motor had only fired for all of three seconds. But they
also agreed that the most important thing was that it had fired.

One month after their initial success, the team more than quadrupled
their initial firing time; and by January of the following year the
rocket motor was putting out between 5 and 8 pounds of thrust for up to
44 seconds. Rocket propulsion, and more importantly, the science of
rocket propulsion, had come to Pasadena.

Today, space probes designed, built and managed within earshot of that
first Arroyo rocket firing have reached every planet in our solar
system
and peered well beyond its boundaries. Each probe carries on it the
logo
of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But more importantly, each probe
carries with it the legacy of scientific and engineering excellence
that
began some 70 years ago in an isolated, scrub-strewn gulch in the
Arroyo.

A wonderful bit of nostalgia from when I was 1-1/2 years old. Thanks.

--
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