Mastering rocket science

Now that we are stupidly rendering Earth almost entirely uninhabitable by many species including our own (through overcrowding, failing political systems, chemical pollution and climate disorder), a few humans of means are looking forward to migrating soon to other planets, even though, as yet, there are no good hotels and restaurants there. Scientists, stimulated by international rivalry and their own ambitions during the past century, have put together the machines and propellants for interplanetary travel. Here are two excellent, microscopically detailed books about the most important individuals and organisations that achieved personkind’s first progress into space.

In Escape from Earth, Fraser MacDonald, who teaches historical geography at Edinburgh University, has raised a crucially influential American pioneer rocketeer from obscurity to the recognition he deserves. Frank J. Malina, born in Brenham, Texas in 1912, of Czechoslovakian immigrant parents, developed a rocket that was propelled at five times the speed of sound up to 224 miles in altitude, on which even more powerful, longer-range rockets were founded.

In 1938 Malina joined many of his Caltech (California Institute of Technology) scientific colleagues in the Ccommunist party, when it was apparently less a pro-Russian revolutionary conspiracy than a liberal-socialist extension of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. His earliest collaborator in experimental rocketry was one Jack Parsons, a self-taught expert in liquid and solid explosives, who eventually blew himself up (accidentally or deliberately?). A California newspaper identified him as ‘the high priest of a weird sex cult’.

Rocketeers have not always been taken seriously. However, Caltech’s Theodore von Karman, who claimed to be the greatest scientist in the world after Newton and Einstein, always encouraged Malina to proceed with his experiments. In the beginning, Malina liked to believe, he did so for peaceful purposes, such as meteorological observation and boosting aircraft for short take-offs.