Frank Malina, ca. 1960s. From left: Dr. William H. Pickering Jr., Dr. Theodore Von Kármán, and Dr. Malina. Courtesy of NASA (GPN-2000-000488/JPL P8695A).

Malina, Frank Joseph (2 Oct. 1912-9 Nov. 1981), aeronautical engineer, was born in Brenham, Texas, the son of Czech immigrants Frank Malina, a musician, and Caroline Marek. After graduating from Texas A&M University in 1934, Malina received a fellowship from the California Institute of Technology, where he quickly became involved with its Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT). He earned an M.S. in mechanical engineering in 1935 and a second M.S. in aeronautical engineering in 1936. He received a Ph.D. magna cum laude in aeronautics in 1940. In his dissertation he examined the problems of rocket propulsion and sounding rocket flight performance. Malina served as an assistant professor at CIT from 1942 until 1946. He married Marjorie Duckworth, his second wife, in 1949; they had two children.

Aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán, director of GALCIT and doctoral adviser to Malina, had encouraged Malina to pursue rocket research, and Malina and von Kármán developed a close, lifelong working relationship. Malina later became recognized as a founder of modern rocketry. In 1936, with von Kármán's blessing, Malina and a small group of men interested in rockets founded the GALCIT Rocket Research Project. From 1940 to 1944 Malina was the chief engineer of the Air Corps Jet Propulsion Research Project of GALCIT; in 1944 these projects became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a somewhat independent research facility attached to the California Institute of Technology. JPL later developed lunar and planetary spacecraft under contract to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

In the 1930s and early 1940s rocketry and rocket propulsion were popularly associated with radio, movie, and comic strip portrayals of space travel by fictional characters like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. To distance its rocket research from such fiction, in 1944 JPL was not named the "Rocket Propulsion Laboratory." In fact many scientists did not believe that rocket propulsion had a future; one scientist even encouraged Malina to pursue other interests. Rocketry had such a bad reputation that institutional funding of research was unavailable. Possible military use of rockets also limited the sharing of research results, especially between nations during World War II. Despite these limitations, in 1936 Malina and his associates conceived of using a liquid-fueled motor to power a high-altitude sounding rocket. In 1937 they made limited progress in actually running such a motor.

Robert Goddard's earlier experimental rockets had been propelled by liquid oxygen, a difficult to handle and store oxidizer, whose use therefore seemed impractical. Looking for propellant combinations that were easier to use, more reliable, and practical, Malina led a group of researchers, including John W. Parsons at the Rocket Research Project of GALCIT, in testing many liquid fuels. They developed red fuming nitric acid (RFNA) and aniline, a propellant combination that achieved great use in American rocketry. RFNA and aniline ignited spontaneously, yet were reliable and storable.

Frank Malina and the JATO team in the 1940s. Dr. Theodore von Kármán sketches a plan on an airplane wing. From left: Dr. Clark Millikan, Dr. Martin Summerfield, Dr. von Kárm´n, Frank Malina, and Capt. Homer Boushey. Courtesy of NASA (GPN-2000-001652).

Malina and another researcher, H. S. Tsien, also continued a theoretical study of the thermodynamic characteristics of rocket motors. Although they initially thought their research in rocket propulsion would be applied to upper atmosphere sounding rockets, its first use occurred in assisting aircraft takeoff. In 1941 a small airplane--the Ercoupe--took off at March Field near Riverside, California, assisted by solid-fuel rockets. This was the first successful American use of solid fuel JATOs (jet-assisted takeoff). A year later, a liquid-fuel JATO assisted a light bomber, the Douglas A-20a, to take off at the Army Air Corps Bombing and Gunnery Range at Muroc, California, another American first. Under Malina's direction, researchers also developed and patented a hydrazine-nitric acid fuel. This mixture was later used to propel the engines for the Apollo Service and Lunar Excursion Modules. Malina, von Kármán, Jack Parsons, Ed Forman, Martin Summerfield, and Andrew Haley founded the Aerojet Engineering Corporation in 1942 to build JATOs.

In the summer of 1944, prompted by 1943 British intelligence reports on German advancements in rocketry, Malina and his associates began developing a series of rockets that eventually led to an American version of the German V-2. Their first effort--the ten-mile-range solid fuel Private A--was an experimental missile stabilized with fixed fins, boosted out of a rail-type launcher by a quick-burning JATO unit. The successful launches of Private A made it a distance predecessor of the Minuteman and other American composite solid-propellant rockets. Malina and his associates added wings to the Private A to create the Private F, theorizing that range would increase by 50 percent with a reduced payload. Instead, the Private F had only limited success, with each test round going into a tailspin.

While slow progress was made on the large liquid-propelled missile named Corporal, Malina built a model Corporal, the WAC Corporal, to be used as a high-altitude scientific sounding rocket. The launch of the sixteen-foot-tall WAC Corporal in 1945 crowned Malina's rocket career. Fueled by RFNA and aniline, the WAC Corporal was boosted out of a 100-foot-tall launch tower by a modified ballistic armament rocket. The WAC Corporal met its performance expectation and in 1949, when boosted on the nose of a captured V-2, became the first man-made object to reach outer space.

Malina made a number of other important contributions to rocketry during his career. With von Kármán, he developed in 1940 the theory of constant-thrust long-duration solid fuel rocket motors. In 1942 he and another associate, Mark Mills, designed and patented a safety pressure relief valve for solid propellant rocket motors. In 1943, with Martin Summerfield, Malina introduced and patented improvements in methods of applying rocket propulsion to flying boats. In 1946 they formulated the "Malina-Summerfield Criterion" for step-rockets. This criterion stated that each step of the optimum step-rocket has an equal ratio between its payload mass and the total mass of the step-rocket propelling that payload.

In 1944 and in 1946 Malina worked with the U.S. War Department for European Missions, traveling to Britain and France as a scientific consultant. He studied British rocket developments and the remains of a German V-2 rocket, which had landed in Sweden. His trip to France included inspection of German V-1 and V-2 launching sites in the Pas-de-Calais region. He also traveled often to Washington, D.C., to obtain funding for JPL rocket programs and as a consultant to the U.S. National Defense Research Committee.

In 1947 Malina left JPL to work on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in Paris. He sought to increase international cooperation in scientific studies, having experienced firsthand the limiting nature of international conflict and competition. He was first assigned to study ways to decrease national barriers to allow the free movement of scientists and their equipment. He also worked on the Arid Zone Research Program, one of UNESCO's major projects at the time. Malina was a counselor in the Natural Sciences Department at UNESCO in 1947-1948, becoming the deputy director of this department in 1948 and later serving as the head of the Division of Scientific Research from 1951 to 1953. The International Astronautical Federation named him their permanent representative to UNESCO in 1959.

In 1953 Malina resigned from his post at UNESCO to become a studio artist. While living in Paris, he developed kinetic sculpture that linked art, science, and technology. His more that 250 works used electric light in motion and were exhibited in Paris and other cities in Europe and around the world. Malina founded Leonardo, a magazine of the contemporary arts, in 1967-1968 and acted as editor.

In the late 1950s, at the request of his mentor von Kármán, Malina returned to rocketry and helped found the International Academy of Astronautics. Created to promote international cooperation in astronautics, a close match in its intent to Malina's previous UNESCO work, the academy was remarkable in that it transcended Cold War barriers and brought Eastern European and Soviet scientists together with Western scientists. Between 1960 and 1965 Malina was one of four coeditors of Astronomica Acta, a publication of the academy.

Malina presented several professional papers related to his work at GALCIT and JPL between 1936 and 1946. The first of these was "The Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Its Origins and First Decade of Work" (Spaceflight, 6 [Sept. 1964]: 160-65 and [Oct. 1964]: 193-97). In 1967 Malina prepared a paper for the First International Symposium on the History of Astronautics in Belgrade that later appeared as "The Rocket Pioneers: Memoirs of the Infant Days of Rocketry at Caltech [1934-1939]" in Engineering and Science (31 [Feb. 1968]: 9-13, 30-32).

As an early pioneer in the field of rocketry and propulsion, Malina made many valuable contributions. His innovations in long-duration propulsion and solid and liquid fuel propellants were particularly important. According to a 1958 letter to Malina from Rear Admiral D. S. Fahrney, U.S.N. (retired), "It was based on your findings that we produced the first jet propelled guided missile in this country." Malina promoted international cooperation in the sciences, especially astronautics, and was admired for his efforts. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the French Aeronautics Society, the British Interplanetary Society, Sigma Xi, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the International Academy of Astronautics and was a fellow at the American Astronautics Society and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Malina died at his home in Boulogne-sur-Seine, near Paris.

Malina's papers are at the Library of Congress, with a microform copy at the California Institute of Technology Archives. A more detailed biography of Malina, a longer bibliography of his works, and copies of most of his scientific studies are available at the JPL Archives. Malina described the military application of rockets and the accompanying research and development in which he engaged during World War II in "The US Army Air Corps Jet Propulsion Research Project, GALCIT Project No. 1, 1939-1946: A Memoir," Proceedings of the Third International History Symposium of the International Academy of Astronautics, 1969 (1973). He recalled the work JPL did for the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps involving rockets in a presentation at the International Academy of Astronautics Symposium on the History of Astronautics in Brussels in Sept. 1971 that was later published as "America's First Long-Range Missile and Space Exploration Program," Spaceflight 15 (Dec. 1973): 442-56. General summary articles by Malina that describe his experiences as an artist include "Some Reflections on the Differences between Science and Art," in Data: Directions in Art Theory/Aesthetics, ed. Anthony Hill (1968), pp. 134-49, and "Electric Light as a Medium in the Visual Fine Arts: A Memoir," Leonardo 8 (1975): 109-19.