The WAC Corporal, by contrast, aimed to open up the secrets of the upper atmosphere rather than kill civilians it was also built with just a fraction of the budget and personnel of the V-2. That distinction goes to the German V-2 rocket, designed to skirt the edge of space before raining death and terror upon London and Antwerp. Photograph: Malina FamilyĪdmittedly, the WAC Corporal wasn’t the highest flight to date. His achievements are central to the birth of the Space Age yet at the moment when his contribution to astronautics should have been recognised, he was rewarded instead with years of FBI harassment.ĭesign of the WAC Corporal rocket. JPL may be well known but its founder Frank Malina is not the household name he deserves to be. The founders of JPL – Caltech aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán and his PhD student Frank Malina – wanted none of the cultural baggage of the R-word, they just wanted to get into space without breathless media speculation. The problem with “rocket” was that the word was so often synonymous with cranks and fantasists, people who were more into sci-fi than sober science. Few people these days talk of “jet propulsion” even when the phrase emerged in 1943, it was a euphemism for a word that engineers worried might get the public a little too excited: “rocket”. But this kind of careful language runs deep in JPL’s institutional history – starting with its own name.

A pattern of hydrated salts called “recurring slope lineae” doesn’t, to be honest, sound quite so refreshing. The recent announcement of a discovery on Mars may have been big news but NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) were still a little coy about calling it “water”.

Malina mars