Was America's Top Rocketeer a Communist Spy? The FBI Thought So

New submitter IMissAlexChilton (3748631) writes Frank Malina masterfully led the World War II effort to build U.S. rockets for jet-assisted takeoff and guided missiles. As described in IEEE Spectrum, Malina's motley crew of engineers and enthusiasts (including occultist Jack Parsons) founded the Jet Propulsion Lab and made critical breakthroughs in solid fuels, hypergolics, and high-altitude sounding rockets, laying the groundwork for NASA's future successes. And yet, under suspicion by the Feds at the war's end, Malina gave up his research career, and his team's efforts sank into obscurity. Taking his place: the former Nazi Wernher von Braun. Read "Frank Malina: America's Forgotten Rocketeer". Includes cool vintage footage of early JPL rocket tests.

Comments

another GNU link

[clovis]

I think this is the intended artice:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aeros...

Re:White Werhner von Braun may be many things...

[JDAustin]

Of course you need to remember that the US government was infiltrated with communist spies and sympathizers. You only need to look at Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Harry Hopkins and the Rosenbergs.

Re:White Werhner von Braun may be many things...

[pupsocket]

From the article:

"The actual manufacturing was done by prisoners from the concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora. As the historian Michael J. Neufeld has documented, von Braun went so far as to handpick detainees with technical qualifications for this work. (The prisoners were worked literally to death. In all, about 12,000 died producing von Braun’s rockets; for comparison, the rockets themselves would kill an estimated 9,000 people, many of them civilians.)"

interesting, somehow I didn't even know this

[Trepidity]

Malina is pretty well known in some corners of CS for his work on kinetic sculpture and generative art, and for founding the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, along with its associated journal Leonardo . But I didn't know he did rockets earlier in his career.

Re:Sick of Denialists

[flyingfsck]

Yup. Most Americans have no idea what communism really is/was. Basically, it was a power grab by a large number of apparachik (officious) people, who enjoyed micromanagement of everyone around them about everything. Nosy Parkers on steroids. In most western countries today, we have many communist institutions now: Old age pension, disability pension, health care, limited working hours, minimum wages... However, we also have the bad things associated with communism: Overflowing prisons, secret/not so secret military prisons (Guantanamo, Guam), places of torture (CIA camps in Poland), spying on everybody innocent or not (NSA, CIA), border fences with guards who shoot to kill (Arizona, California border with Mexico)...

Re:Nazis over Scientology

[Artifakt]

Where did it say he was a scientologist? They didn't even exist back them. You made that up to pump up your argument.

Jack Parsons was friends with L. Ron Hubbard for a time, and this friendship allegedly failed because Hubbard took off with a great deal of Parsons' money. Again allegedly, Scientology was founded with that money. Malina and Parsons are two major figures in rocketry who did various occult rituals with both Alastair Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard and basically the historical links between those last two are mostly links through the rocket researchers more than direct contacts.

Re:White Werhner von Braun may be many things...

[serviscope_minor]

That simplifies is slightly.

The V2 was about as expensive as a top-end fighter jet (thought the only jets were top end then). So every V2 meant one less fighter in the air, except it didn't. The problem they had was a massive lack of oil for fuel which means the fighters couldn't fly. The V2s were powered by alcohol, and no one had planes able to run off the stuff then.

Also, if the Reich's nuclear bomb ambitions had worked out, the V2 would have provided an unstoppable delivery mechanism.

Where do you get this garbage?

[Anonymous Coward]

You clearly have not read the appropriate NASA documents.

Skylab was in very good condition and NASA wanted to use it in conjunction with the shuttle, which was scheduled to be operational before Skylab fell into the atmosphere. The Shuttle was to be used to re-boost it, but two things happened: [1] solar activity was higher than expected (which affects the upper-most part of the atmosphere and increased the atmospheric drag on Skylab) and [2] the shuttle ended-up being too far behind schedule. NASA, realizing that shuttles would not be ready in time, studied launching an unmanned "tug" to dock with and re-boost Skylab so it would still be there on orbit and operational by the time shuttles were ready, but congress in the late 70's was as stupid as today - Congress did not fund this cheap solution, so we ended-up dumping $100 Billion and ten years of construction time into building ISS to get a similar orbital capability (Skylab had 320 cubic meters pressurized volume, that's more than the US part of the ISS). The shuttle could have then flown additions to Skylab (which had a docking adapter for multiple visiting vehicles). An enhanced Skylab would have had no Russian "entanglements", and had its own lifesupport and navigation capabilities.

Skylab was FAR from "worn out" and the damage from the launch was quite managable. The astronauts who closed it out left it ready for re-manning. When Skylab re-entered the atmosphere it did so under remote control from the ground, with its systems fully functioning until they were destroyed by the reentry. READ THE DAMNED REPORTS, which consist of hundreds of paged of excellent details, before misinforming people.

Re:Where do you get this garbage?

[DerekLyons]

You clearly have not read the appropriate NASA documents.

Actually, yes, I have.
 

Skylab was in very good condition and NASA wanted to use it in conjunction with the shuttle

NASA was (is) an organization of thousands of people - and cannot "want" anything. A small group of people, who had no funding, wanted to use Skylab in conjunction with the Shuttle, but that was just one of the dozens (hundreds?) of pie-in-the-sky ideas various groups within NASA generate on an annual basis. Very few space fanboys realize this and presume every single dammed one of those gotta-publish-something-to-keep-my-job studies and "plans" (was) is something "NASA wanted to do" no matter how ludicrous the idea was. Actually, the more ludicrous the idea the more the space fanboys love it, because it's just more ammo for their ignorant whinging about NASA's "failures". Ignorant because on top of not grasping the pie-in-the-sky nature of many of those "plans", they fail to realize that NASA is not an independent organism - but rather is a branch of the Executive Department and only does what the Executive approves and Congress fails.
 

Congress did not fund this cheap solution, so we ended-up dumping $100 Billion and ten years of construction time into building ISS to get a similar orbital capability (Skylab had 320 cubic meters pressurized volume, that's more than the US part of the ISS).

What's interesting here is you claim Skylab would provide similar capability - but then rather than comparing capability, you compare volume. Thus, probably inadvertently due to gross ignorance, you reveal the shallowness of your knowledge. In reality, Skylab didn't have a fraction of *any* of the capabilities of the ISS. It doesn't produce as much power, could only support a much smaller crew, and wasn't equipped with but a fraction of the scientific equipment, etc... (Even though Skylab and the ISS have a similar volume, the ISS has almost six times the mass. There's a reason for that.) Nor, given the small diameter of it's hatches, could it have been reasonably refitted to provide significant extended capability. Raw volume is impressive, but it's no more useful than an empty house. It's useful stuff that make a house or a space station useful, and Skylab was grossly lacking in that department.
 

The shuttle could have then flown additions to Skylab (which had a docking adapter for multiple visiting vehicles).

Yes, Skylab had a docking adapter for visiting vehicles. No, they weren't useful for adding additional modules. On top of lacking the structural strength, they had no provision for routing power, life support, data, etc. (Not without running cables through the already narrow docking tunnel - not that there was anywhere to hook them to on the Skylab end anyhow.)
 

When Skylab re-entered the atmosphere it did so under remote control from the ground, with its systems fully functioning until they were destroyed by the reentry.

No, they weren't "fully functioning". The third crew had to use a lashed up servicing system to replenish the freon loops in the air lock module (which were leaking). The also had to perform a spacewalk to install a back up set of rate gyros since the original set were failing. (Etc... etc...) Skylab was worn out, and it's equipment was beginning to fail even while the manned occupancy program was in progress.

A lot of people believe that Skylab was some lunar landing level program, and that in the same vein "tossing it aside" represented the loss of some grand capability. Nothing could be further from the truth. Skylab was a shoestring budget program subsisting on Apollo's leftovers and discards. (To the point where they had to take a hatch off an unused Gemini to provide an EVA hatch - they had no money to develop or build one of their own.) It had a minimal lifespan and modest scientific capability with no capacity for significant resupply, replenishment, refitting or extension.

Better a Nazi than a Commi

[rainer_d]

That was really the line of thinking in large parts of the US-government for a while.
Best expressed by no one else than Harry S Truman, who, when a member of the congress complained about the huge amounts of former Nazis in the new intelligence agency the US was building up in post-war Germany (nowadays known as BND), simply replied: "I don't care if this Gehlen guy [first head of the agency, a former Nazi-general] is fucking goats - as long as he's helping us, we'll use him".

During the 2nd world-war, if you played your cards well in Germany, you could achieve a lot. Some people early on realized this and built a career on it that often continued after the war. If you had the support of "the system", you had almost unlimited resources at your disposal.
Von Braun used these resources because he had a vision, a dream - and he was crazy and ruthless enough to sacrifice anything to make his dream come true.
Like the above mentioned Gehlen, he was also bold enough to change sides when the right time had come - knowing that the work he had done and the ideas in his head were more interesting to the Allies than the rest of what had happened during the war.

People from the UK (where V2 rockets hit mostly) are usually furious when you mention the name - they'd have probably wanted to put him up for trial in Nuremberg and seen him hanging - but his work, his men and he himself were already too important by the time the court was setup - and the cold-war had already started.