America's forgotten rocketeer

In the early decades of the 20th century, rocket science wasn't considered the brainy endeavor it is now. Far from it: Simply expressing an interest in the field was enough to provoke ridicule. Becoming a rocket scientist was enough to get you ostracized from whatever field you were in before. Frank Malina didn't care. Overcoming incredible institutional resistance and rather daunting technical and financial odds, the engineer, while still a grad student at Caltech in the mid-1930s, started up a research program that would lay the foundations for U.S. rocket and missile development. During the run-up to World War II, that work took on new significance. By the war's end, Malina had become the top American rocket expert and had cofounded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which today is one of the world's premier space research organizations. And yet, you've probably never heard of him. Most histories of the U.S. space program treat Malina and his group as a footnote. They say the real work started only after the war, with the arrival of Wernher von Braun, Hitler's chief rocket scientist. Without the German's genius,the story goes, U.S. extraterrestrial explorations would never have gone so far so fast.