Frank Malina
Frank Joseph Malina (October 2, 1912 – November 9, 1981) was an American aeronautical engineer and painter, especially known for becoming both a pioneer in the art world and the realm of scientific engineering.
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[edit] Early life
Malina was born in Brenham, Texas. His father came from Bohemia. Frank's formal education began with a degree in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M University in 1934.
In 1935, while a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Malina persuaded Professor of Aeronautics Theodore von Kármán to allow him to pursue studies into rocketry and rocket propulsion. The formal goal was development of a sounding rocket.
Malina and five associates (including Jack Parsons) became known at Caltech as the "Suicide Squad" because of their dangerous experiments (and failures) when testing rocket motor designs.
Malina's group was forced to move their operations away from the main Caltech campus into the more remote Arroyo Seco. This site and the research Malina was conducting would later become the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Malina served as the first Director of JPL.
[edit] Career
In 1942, von Kármán, Malina and three other students started the Aerojet Corporation.
By late 1945, Malina's rockets had outgrown the facility at Arroyo Seco, and his tests were moved to White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Here, the project's Wac Corporal sounding rocket was the first U. S. rocket to break the 50-mile altitude mark, becoming the first sounding rocket to reach space.[1]
During 1947, with rocket research in high-gear, Malina's demanding travel and administrative schedule, along with a dislike of so much rocketry research being devoted to weapons systems and not scientific research, caused him to reevaluate his career and leave Aerojet. He joined the fledgling United Nations as secretariat of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) under Julian Huxley.
In 1951, Malina became head of UNESCO's division of scientific research. Two years later, Malina left UNESCO to pursue an interest in kinetic art.
In 1968 in Paris[2] he founded Leonardo, an international peer-reviewed research journal that featured articles written by artists on their own work, and focused on the interactions between the contemporary arts with the sciences and new technologies. The Leonardo Journal is still published as of 2010 as a project of Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, an organisation devoted to promoting connections between the arts, sciences and technology.
[edit] Death and family
Frank Malina died in 1981 in Boulogne Billancourt, near Paris, France. His widow Marjorie Duckworth Malina died in 2006. Their sons Roger and Alan Malina live and work in France and Portugal respectively.
[edit] See also
- GALCIT
- Qian Xuesen (H.S. Tsien)
[edit] References and notes
- ^ The U.S. at the time used a definition of space as beginning at 50 miles altitude, instead what would become the international standard 100 km (62 mi). See Kármán line.
- ^ Origin of Leonardo journal at its official website
[edit] External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Frank Malina |
- "Malina, Frank Joseph". American National Biography. http://www.anb.org/articles/13/13-02215.html.
- 'Frank Malina On Line Archive'
- Biography
- Frank Malina timeline
- Leonardo Journal
- JPL history
- MG Lord (2005). Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science. New York: Walker & Company. ISBN 0-8027-1427-7. Includes a detailed account of Malina's post-JPL life, by a scholar who had access to his FBI file
- "Propulsion" –– The documentary, Huffington Post
