Framing figure — Frank Malina
Frank Malina was born on 2 October 1912 in Brenham, Texas, graduated from Texas A&M in 1934, and moved to the California Institute of Technology on a fellowship, where he took master's degrees in mechanical and aeronautical engineering before beginning doctoral work on rocket propulsion under Theodore von Kármán. In 1936 Malina helped form the GALCIT Rocket Research Project, whose graduate-student experiments in the Arroyo Seco riverbed above Pasadena led to his 1940 Ph.D. thesis on rocket-propulsion theory and, in 1943, to the site's adoption of the name Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Malina served as JPL's acting director from 1944 to 1946.
The event this issue is built around happened alongside that research, not inside it. In 1941, Malina, Jack Parsons, Ed Forman, Martin Summerfield and pilot Homer Bushey demonstrated the first jet-assisted take-off rockets to the Army. The Army wanted a manufacturer, not a laboratory, and Caltech had no interest in becoming one. So on 19 March 1942 Malina, von Kármán, Parsons, Forman, Summerfield and attorney Andrew G. Haley incorporated the Aerojet Engineering Corporation in Pasadena — von Kármán as president, Malina as treasurer — to build JATO rockets under contract. That is the split this reader inherits: a research laboratory on one side of Pasadena, and a manufacturing company on the other, created because the laboratory would not build production hardware and the Army needed someone who would.
Aerojet took its first production contract within three months of incorporation and grew into what von Kármán later called the world's largest manufacturer of rockets and propellants. Malina left both JPL and Aerojet by the late 1940s; he resigned from JPL in 1947 and spent the rest of his career abroad, first with UNESCO and then as a kinetic artist, before his death in Paris in 1981. The company he helped found did not need him to keep manufacturing. Every solicitation in this issue that specifies a NAICS code for guided-missile and space-vehicle manufacturing is asking, in procurement language, for the same thing Malina's incorporation papers supplied in 1942: a production source, not a research finding.