12 July 2019
This is the untold story of the engineers, dreamers and rebels who started the American space programme. In particular, it is the story of Frank Malina, founder of what became Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the scientist who cracked the ‘problem of escape from the Earth by rocket’.
It’s a wild ride. Jack Parsons, Malina’s chemistry-expert research partner, was a bed-hopping occultist with delusions of grandeur. There are drug parties and sex magic, cameos by Aleister Crowley and L Ron Hubbard, and an ill-fated attempt to start a mail-order religion.
Armed with hitherto unpublished letters, journals, and documents from the Malina family archives, Fraser MacDonald reveals the secret history of the space rocket.
Discover Escape from Earth: A Secret History of the Space Rocket
Space flight may seem like a transcendent theme – the stuff of soaring visions and azure skies – but its history is grounded in the dirt. This book is the unearthing.
It is a story that I’ve reconstructed from archives buried in obscure places. Perhaps that’s why the research has so often felt like an exhumation. It’s not just that the principal characters in this book are dead, which they are, but that their reputations have followed them down to the grave. This is about people who have, for the most part, been forgotten, even though their lives are central to the achievements of the twentieth century. I only found out about them through an accident of geography.
In the closing years of the twentieth century, I was conducting some doctoral fieldwork on the island of North Uist, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. I didn’t go there to study rockets but my interest in the cultural landscape made me curious about the one place on the island to which I was denied access: a hilltop called Cleatrabhal, ‘hill of the ridge’ in Old Norse. Its militarised summit gives a commanding view over the irregular carpet of moor and loch; there are even traces of Neolithic and Iron Age communities. But it’s the Cold War infrastructure that still dominates Cleatrabhal, and it was there that I first started to dig into the story of the Space Age.
I learned that this site had been part of a rocket testing range built on the neighbouring island of South Uist in the late 1950s. The next time I was down in London, I dredged the National Archives to find declassified military files about the planning of the range. I discovered that it had been built to test a type of American rocket. And not just any rocket: the Corporal was the first guided missile authorised to carry a nuclear warhead. To my mild shame, I had never heard of it. I wrote a few dry academic papers about missile testing and Cold War geopolitics, but the origins of this technology remained a bit hazy. I knew that the Corporal had been designed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and I knew, too, that JPL was at the forefront of space exploration today. But I thought it a bit odd that the key engineer behind both the rocket and the laboratory should be such a distant figure. His name was Frank J. Malina.
In 2006, I noticed a new Wikipedia article about Malina – a one sentence entry that described him as an ‘aeronautical engineer and painter’. Ploughing through a few books and oral histories turned up more information. I read that when he was little more than a graduate student, with the help of friends whose credentials were even less impressive than his own, he developed the first US rocket to reach an extreme altitude. It’s called the WAC Corporal, the precursor to the Corporal. These days ‘rocket science’ is a cliché for complexity, a shorthand for engineering brilliance. In the 1930s, however, the opposite was the case: rocketry was so discredited that it didn’t belong anywhere near the word ‘science’. Yet it was Frank Malina, arguably more than anyone else in the United States, who made it respectable. Why then was his name absent from histories of space flight? There were rumours about his politics, and even more outlandish stories about his colleagues.
Years passed. I was invited to give a paper at the International Astronautical Congress, where by chance I ran into the astronomer Roger Malina, Frank’s son. I had no particular plans to write about his father but I was intrigued by why he wasn’t better known. Why did he walk away from practical rocketry? Why did he leave the United States? ‘You should come to our home in Paris,’ Roger suggested. ‘We have a family archive there.’
It took me a few more years – life happens; I wasn’t in a hurry – but eventually I made it to the Malina house. Roger opened the gate and welcomed me through the courtyard into the home where he grew up. Tucked away off a quiet back street in Boulogne-Billancourt, the house exudes a kind of homely modernism: simple concrete lines, a quirky spiral staircase, high ceilings and low furniture. In the study was a panorama of books, photographs and paintings, preserved in a state of lifelike disorder.
In the adjacent office I scanned the shelves. Each was laden with box files of letters, drawings, photos, sketches, more letters, magazines, exhibition catalogues, receipts, so many letters. There were documents of every conceivable kind – many of them intimate rather than institutional. Love letters. Letters to his mother. There were more formal papers too: a thick correspondence with lawyers, an archive box on which was written ‘Box V: Witchhunt file’. Frank’s life felt so close at hand, it was as if he had just stepped out to the patisserie. On his bedside table I spotted his wristwatch, a tiny calendar clipped to the strap: November 1981.
I had only been in Paris for a few hours when I realised that what had been an idle curiosity on Cleatrabhal, then an academic interest in London’s National Archives, was now something urgent and personal. Here was an extraordinary life. I didn’t know the full story then, not even half of it, but I felt certain that there was a story.
With Roger’s permission, I photographed everything I could find, page by page, and read the material back in Scotland. I filled notebooks with details of Malina’s friends and colleagues. I pieced together his relationships from the letters, working out who he trusted and who he didn’t. I started to find gaps: letters missing; things that didn’t add up. I found Frank Malina’s FBI file and blinked at some of the allegations it contained. I submitted my own Freedom of Information requests to declassify the FBI files on Malina’s friends. There were thousands of pages to examine in this house, but it was only a starting point; the search took me spiralling outwards, into other circuits of association.
The momentum I built up in Frank’s archive was dragged by the search for FBI files. First you have to prove that the subject is dead and provide enough information (social security number, dates of birth, death, marriage) to identify the relevant files. If any are found you then join the declassification queue; that can take five years. Released files have many of the names redacted – blacked out – so that although you have some idea of what has happened, it’s difficult to know who it happened to. It requires endless comparisons with other files and other archives. Much of this is repetitive and boring. Now and again, I’d find a little nugget. In the spring of 2016, a new file arrived. And with a single name on a single page, mistakenly left unredacted, I found the motherlode.
The trouble with FBI files as sources is that they’re only as reliable as the agents and their informants. They can be useful, but they aren’t the Truth. On reading them I still needed wider evidence – letters, diaries, oral histories – to give a more nuanced picture. Foremost here were the papers and journals kept by Frank’s first wife, Liljan. Even with all this material, getting the measure of this story depended on getting to know its characters; that in turn meant getting to know their children, even grandchildren. These conversations weren’t always relaxed. I was asking about past membership in the US Communist Party, not the kind of talk that puts anyone at ease. But in time, unseen and often unknown sources began to emerge, sometimes dramatically changing the story: the people who remembered FBI agents sitting in cars at the bottom of their driveway; or those who recalled the suited men watching as they bought ice cream as children; the family that came home one day to find a nail driven into a door frame, preventing its tight closure. Some of these recollections cut deep.
Half a century after the moon landings, we have inherited a particular image of America’s Space Age pioneers: the steely-eyed missile man facing the great unknown. In the mass of papers and testimonies piling up in my own study, I saw something else: something repressed and unspeakable, something hidden and shameful. Something secret.
This is the story of the birth of the space rocket. In the pages that follow, you’ll learn how humankind first reached beyond the atmosphere of Earth to worlds beyond. But it is more than that. It’s about what we will allow ourselves to know about the darker legacies of the twentieth century, and the dangerous ideas that won’t stay buried. I didn’t expect this story to turn out as it did. Then again, I didn’t think I’d be the one to uncover it.