http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/podcast/content.cfm?content=1029

The documentary is being shown Nov 3 on KCET in Los Angeles

Open with music and voice track from “The American Rocketeer”:
This is the story of one man’s reach for the stars. And how his ideas and idealism put him on a collision course with the world. It is the story of the American Rocketeer.

Music fades
Narrator: I’m Jane Platt with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. At this site 75 years ago on Halloween Day, October 31, 1936, a group of Caltech students tested the first rockets in what was then just an open field with scruffy vegetation.

Music, with Clayton Koppes: There was a widely used astronomy textbook published in the early 1930s which said that rocket flight was impossible. It was something that was really not even on the fringes, even beyond the fringes of respectable science.

Music fades
Narrator: Clayton Koppes is the author of “JPL and The American Space Program” and one of the people interviewed in a new documentary produced by Blaine Baggett of JPL’s Office of Communications and Education. The documentary, called “The American Rocketeer,” focuses on one of the first rocket testers, Frank Malina. Blaine, for people who might not be familiar with the history, exactly what happened on October 31, 1936?

Baggett: After a number of months of trying to scrape together enough equipment to actually have an experiment, several Caltech students and some rocket enthusiasts piled their equipment, sand bags, shovels into a Caltech truck and drove over here to a deserted area of Pasadena and put their sand bags up, put a rocket engine upside down because of the thrust…they were just measuring the thrust and conducted a rocket experiment that actually didn’t go so well. The hose came loose, it caught fire. You’ve got these young rocketeers running for their lives , scampering about all over the Arroyo.

Narrator: So that didn’t go so well but they didn’t give up, they kept at it.

Baggett: They did indeed. It was a great dream of these young twenty-something year olds to actually reach space at a time when “rocket science” were two words that were not even joined together yet.

Narrator: For purposes of this documentary, you chose to focus on Frank Malina specifically, one of the rocketeers. Why did you choose him?

Baggett: I just simply thought that his personal story was so incredible. The dilemmas that he faced. The fact that he was a pacifist who built weapons, despite his really strong feelings. That he had international leanings, that despite all he had done as a patriot, found at the end of the war that he would be labeled a fugitive by his own country. That he was a socialist who became a millionaire, an engineer who became an artist. His life plays out against the backdrop of the Great Depression, against the backdrop of World War II, against the Red Scare and really the early days of the Space Age, as well. And he’s very much involved in all these areas in a sizable way that made a difference in the turning of history, but no one knows who he is. Now why is that? I think it’s because of his political leanings, having to actually abandon the United States. He was forgotten when we embraced particularly the Germans who came over after World War II, who we actually came to be household names, like Wernher von Braun, for the United States space program. And it was just too big of an irony to not go and tell that story.

Narrator: While “The American Rocketeer” is focusing on Frank Malina, there is a lot in there about Theodore von Karman, who was a Caltech professor, and we actually right now are doing the interview in the back of the von Karman auditorium at JPL. And I guess we could best sum up von Karman as a mentor to Frank Malina?

Baggett: A tremendous mentor. He had this incredible ability to seek out people who had exceptional talent, tremendous passion and soaring imaginations, and say, “You’re special, I’m going to give you my time and my resources that I can to help you reach for your dreams.” Imagine just saying, “Here are the keys to the lab, don’t blow anything up,” although they almost did. And they were called, by the way, the Suicide Squad, because of all the explosions that were going off on campus, and finally von Karman had to say, “Enough’s enough, you folks have got to move up where it’s a little deserted, and that’s how JPL came to be where it is.

Narrator: Later on, von Karman and, by extension, the work of all the rocketeers, was honored by President John Kennedy.

President Kennedy over music background:
It is hard to visualize what the world would be like without aircraft and jet propulsion. Without the vision we have just entering the realm of reality of exploring space. I’m especially glad to present this first National Medal of Science to one of the pioneers who has helped make all of this new and exciting age possible.
Applause fades.

Baggett: Von Karman was important not only in terms of what happened with the founding of JPL, but really went on to be a major figure advising the Pentagon in the Cold War period.

Narrator: And you alluded to this, that Frank Malina, again the focus of “The American Rocketeer,” he was a little conflicted because he was sort of a pacifist, and his technologies as they evolved ended up being used for not so peaceful purposes.

Baggett: Malina saw what was happening in Germany and realized the Nazi machine had to be stopped. And he chose to help build a weapon system that actually was never deployed during his time, but to work on it because he saw it as the far larger threat. But as soon as the war was over he was done, he wanted nothing more with building weapon systems. He chose, like very few others, to turn a whole other direction and work for peace, working for the United Nations. Also I think what’s interesting that happens in the midst of the war is that he ends up in a situation of where his personal life is crumbling, that his wife leaves. He finds out that the FBI has been looking into his past way back in the thirties when handing out a few pamphlets maybe or going to a couple of meetings of the Communist party would get you in huge, huge trouble, and that’s what happened to him.

Narrator: Fast forwarding to where we are now at JPL, it’s kind of amazing to think of all that has happened since then in the 75 years.

Baggett: It is, I think not only that it’s been 75 years. As I’ve been thinking about it more recently, that JPL is actually an accident of history, that it just happens to be here up against the San Gabriel beautiful mountains because of this experiment that happened 75 years ago. And that these characters were interested in reaching for space, and what happened? This has become the place, the premiere center in all of the world for exploring the solar system and beyond.

Music
Narrator: And locally, there is a free public screening of “The American Rocketeer”at Caltech’s Beckman auditorium on October 25th at 8 p.m. And the program will also air on KCET Los Angeles on November 3, part of a three-part series of documentaries-all produced by Blaine Baggett-called “The Beginnings of the Space Age.” More information is online at www.jpl.nasa.gov/rocketeer . Thanks for joining us for this JPL podcast.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/podcast/content.cfm?content=1029

JPL has issued a documentary-details of screenings below

the Frank Malina archives web site is at:
http://www.olats.org/pionniers/malina/malina.php

roger malina

From: Baggett, Blaine A (1800)
Date: Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 9:23 PM

Greetings, Roger

As I am sure you know, the 75th anniversary of the first rocket test in the Pasadena arroyo will be this Halloween.]
We will be premiering The American Rocketeer at that time.

There is a public screening at Beckman auditorium at Caltech on Tuesday evening, Oct 25. We’ll all all day screenings here at JPL on Oct 31st for our employees.

Our local public tv station, KCET, will be broadcasting the documentary on Nov 3. It will be followed by two other films about JPL (the 50s and 60s at the lab).

Banners are already flying here at JPL about the event, and I wanted you to know we are doing all we can to get the word out about your dad’s achievements and vital role in the creation of JPL.
<
Best,

Blaine Baggett

Projet de recherche : An Art/Sci Exploration of Creativity and Imagination in fields of Nanotechnology and its future Role on Society with emphasis on Nano-Neuromorphic Information Technology and Material Nanoarchitectonics.

http://www.imera.fr/index.php/en/the-fellows/2009-2010/106.html

http://www.imera.fr/index.php/fr/component/content/article/273.html

by Roger F Malina

When Nina Czegledy and Rona Kopeczky proposed to me their exhibition on Gyorgy Kepes and my father Frank Malina, I was immediately interested. It seemed a natural coupling of two men of the same era, eastern European backgrounds, both were survivors of the same world war and with over-lapping passions. Both were deeply immersed in both artistic and scientific cultures, living examples of individuals who bridged  the two cultures that C.P. Snow had been discussing since the 1950s (1).

I first met Gyorgy Kepes in 1968 when I arrived as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kepes had recently founded the Centre for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, dedicated to promoting the work of artists in scientific and technological culture, within one of the most prestigious science and engineering universities in the world. My father had just founded the Leonardo Journal at the scientific publisher Pergamon Press, a journal (2) dedicated to promoting the work of artists in the deeper context of a techno-scientific world. Both had been making art that appropriated scientific landscapes as integral parts of the natural world that was the raw material of art making.

M.I,T,, and America, were a complicated places in 1968, and the relationship of techno-culture to human values not a simple one. The paroxysm caused by the Vietnam War was very much in evidence at M.I.T, one of the hearts of American military-industrial complex. The student union was occupied to protect a draft evader.  Judith Malina and her Living Theater performed as did the rock band the Grateful Dead. Kepes’ C.A.V.S was very much part of an alternative way of coupling science and the arts at M.I.T, a progeny of the Bauhaus tradition and its own infliential example in German society of the 1920s.

My father had worked for the U.S. Military during the war; he headed the team that built the U.S’s first successful high altitude rocket, the W.A.C. Corporal (3), co founded NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet General, a major aerospace company that contributed to success of the Apollo Program. At M.I,T my father introduced me to his friend and colleague Stark Draper. Draper has developed the principle of inertial guidance during the war, and founded the Draper Labs at MIT, one of the major labs that the U.S. military funded for basic and applied research.

One day I found myself demonstrating against the Vietnam War on Massachusetts Avenue outside the Draper Labs. On the roof of the building I could see Stark Draper in his French beret, surrounded by guards, looking down at the crowd of gesticulating students. That same year there  were a parties at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies where physicist Philip Morrison and psychologist Jerome Lettvin mingled with the artists at C.A.V.S. The relationship between art, science and technology was indeed a complicated one at  M.I.T that co-mingled ideas of a search for a new synthetic culture while wrestling with strategic role of  techno-science in the balance of terror.

I recently obtained by father’s U.S.A. F.B.I. files (4) with thirty years of interviews with informants as J.Edgar Hoover sought to convict my father of being a member of the communist party. My father had left the U.S in 1947 to help set up U.N.E.S.C.O as his own contribution to establishing new conditions for world peace. He had resigned his job at UNESCO and lost his U.S. passport because of the F.B.I pursuit. In the F.B.I. files an informant, an informant accuses my father of delaying the winning of the war, by insisting on carrying out too many theoretical calculations before testing their experimental rocket engines. This struggle between theory and praxis was deeply embedded in my father’s scientific and artistic practice; he was surely never a communist.

My father’s Ph.D advisory at the Caltech Institute of Technology had been Thedore Von Karman, a Hungarian émigré, and one of the world’s preeminent applied mathematicians. The ‘Karman Vortex” (5) in turbulence theory is named in recognition of his mastering of the theory of fluid instabilities whose understanding is fundamental in both aeronautics and astronautics. Von Karman has instilled in Frank Malina the deep belief that one needed to deploy advanced mathematics as a tool not only in science and also in engineering.

In another context, physicist Eugene Wigner had called this “the mysterious effectiveness of mathematics” (6). As my father began his art career in the 1950’s he brought this perspective to art making, believing that a theory of art must underlie an artist’s exploration of artistic expression. He was amazed that most artists thought that the theory of art and aesthetics was irrelevant to their work. This attitude led my father to contact Ernest Gombrich, Rudolph Arnheim, J.J. Gibson, but also fractals mathematician Benoit Mandelbrojt and the graph theorist Frank Harary. Fabrice Lapelletrie (7) has documented my father’s continuing seach for the theoretical, and scientific, framework, to contextualize his own art making.

My father’s relationship between theory and praxis in art, in science and in engineering were of one cloth. He wanted theory to guide his understanding of himself and his creativity, and enable his inventions. He started an aerospace company, Aerojet general to commercialise his engineering invention. He started the Electro Lumidyne Company (E.L.I.) to commercialise his inventions in kinetic art which he had also patented, just has he had done in rocketry. His art and his science were both ways for him to appropriate the world around him, to “be” in it and to understand it but also to allow him to contribute to human welfare.

His interest in rocketry was born from the cultural imaginary that he developed reading Jules Verne in the high school back in the Czech republic, where his parents had returned to between the world wars. His interest in art making was all about bringing science and technology into the home environment; he talked of a kinetic art form that was as deeply ingrained in human psychology with the same sense of intimacy of a fire in a hearth that created sense of home, safety and fascination. The Bauhaus influence was deeply ingrained in his own ways of bridging scientific and artistic world views, and of appropriating industrial and engineering processes into the making of fine and applied arts. As he struggled to exhibit his kinetic art in Paris galleries and museums, I remember my father joking that there was more technology in his kitchen that in the best museum in Paris. It is still true today.

In closing, I think that this exhibition which couples Gyorgy Kepes and Frank Malina, makes visible an important thread of intellectual history that cross couples the arts, sciences and engineering of the twentieth century. It highlights the importance of the Bauhaus ideas of coupling art and industrial society, the interesting confluence of scientists and artist with eastern Europeans roots, and the political history of a turbulence times when theory and praxis were sometimes strange bedfellows.

References and Notes

(1) C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and a Second Look: An Expanded Version of the Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution , Cambridge University Press 1969.

(2) Leonardo Journal, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.

(3) Zibit, Ben. The Guggenheim Aeronautics Laboratory at Caltech and the Creation of the Modern Rocket Motor. UMI Dissertation Services, a Bell and Howell Company, 1999.

(4) http://malina.diatrope.com/frank-malina/frank-malina-fbi-files/

(5) The Wind and Beyond – Theodore von Kármán Pioneer in Aviation and Pathfinder in Space, Little Brown, 1967 (with L. Edson). ;( one of my father’s art works is an artists representation of the Karman Vortex Street.

(6) “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” in Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, No. I (February 1960). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 1960 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc

(7) F. Lapelletrie, Ph.D.Thesis, Paris 2010.

(8) I.Hargittai, The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century, Oxford Univ Press,  2006.