[FPSPACE] FW: Feature: The Spark of a New Era

[LARRY KLAES]

>From: "NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory" <info at jpl.nasa.gov>
>Reply-To: <info at jpl.nasa.gov>
>Subject: Feature: The Spark of a New Era
>Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 16:57:44 -0700
>
>Feature    October 25, 2006
>
>The Spark of a New Era
>
>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 mélange 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.
>
>
>