But it wasn't always that way. In JPL's renegade youth, rules were not the
rule.
Herman Bank joined JPL in 1947, expecting the job to be temporary. He retired
37 years later, long after helping engineer America's first space flight, a
brief rocket trip above Earth's atmosphere. In a telephone interview from his
home in Pasadena, Bank remembered when JPL was lean and mean.
"At that time, things were much more experimental, and we took some experimental
risks that we wouldn't do these days," the 84-year-old Bank said. "For example,
we carried a few rockets that were very small and quite secure on an airplane,
a commercial airplane, in order to make the schedule work out. We would take
shortcuts without all the precautions they have now. Of course, things are much
more safe as a result. However, they're much slower too."
Then, there was very little academic atmosphere to squelch innovation or prevent
success.
"In those days, if you had a good idea, you talked to your division chief and
tried it out on him, and then you'd go to the director," he said. "Nowadays
you have to go through three or four steps before you can get to the director."
Dreaming of space
When Bank came to the upstart research facility, which has always been affiliated
with the California Institute of Technology, JPL built guided missiles and engineered
rockets that helped military airplanes take off more quickly. Bank never expected
to work on anything having to do with space travel.
"I had no idea," he said. In those days, the shrewdest scientists went into
aeronautics, Bank says, and only "the really weird people" chose rocketry as
a profession.
But other scientists at JPL, weird or not, had been thinking about rocket
ships and space travel.
One of them, JPL co-founder Frank J. Malina, had been pondering how to leave
the planet since he was a boy, reading science fiction in the early 1920s.
In 1936, Malina and a handful of other students convinced a brilliant Caltech
scientist named Theodore von Karman to supervise their exploration of rockets.
Their first major success occurred on October 31, 1936, when seven young rocket
scientists launched their dreams into the night sky just north of the Rose Bowl.
The event went unnoticed in the nearby community of Pasadena.
The last of the original group that set off those first rockets, Apollo M.O.
Smith, died in 1997. A plaque near the main building at JPL, a stone's throw
from the original launch site, commemorates the group.
Suicide Squad
Prior to World War II, there was no official Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It
was just called "The Project."
In his memoirs, Malina recalls The Project's failed vision for ticket-sales
fundraising -- an anti-war novel about a group of rocket scientists could be
turned into a movie in nearby Hollywood.
Malina and the other original members of the lab, grad students at the time
(two weren't actually students at Caltech, but had been given permission by
von Karman to work with the team), gave a seminar in 1937 on their early test
results and got an unexpected and much needed $1,000 donation from Weld Arnold,
an assistant in Caltech's Astrophysical Laboratory.
They used the money to give formal birth to a laboratory that many officials
didn't want to touch. It might have had something to do with the explosions.
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