The story begins in Brenham Texas in 1912 where Frank Malina was born of Czech immigrants. He
credits the reading of Jules Verne as a child in the town library with inspiring him with a desire to become a
space explorer. After attending Texas A and M, he attended the California Institute Technology and earned
a PhD under Theodore Von Karman, later to be the founder of the IAF and IAA. Malina together with
fellow students Jack Forman, Apollo Smith, Ed Forman and Tsien Hsue-shen went on to develop one of
the most successful lineages of rocket concepts, including the JATO units and the Sergeant missile, as well
as providing a number of fundamental patents of American rocketry; their first rocket firings took place in
October 1936. On October 11, 1945 Malina led the team that launched the WAC Corporal to an altitude
of 43.5 Miles, setting a new world record and was the first man made object to escaper Earth's atmosphere.
Malina co-founded Aerojet General Corporation and JPL, serving as the second Director. After the end
of the War, Malina went on to become the Deputy Science Director of the new organization UNESCO,
dedicating himself to mobilizing international cooperation. He was one of the founders of the IAA during
the 1959 Barcelona congress and served as its second Director. When Malina died in 1981; the IAF instituted
the Frank J Malina Astronautics Medal, with the support of Aerojet General Corporation, for demonstrated
excellence by an educator in promoting astronautics and related sciences. The young students who in 1935
began experimenting with rocket motors had lived to see their dreams for the peaceful exploration of outer
space begin to be realized. This Highlight Lecture will describe the life and times of one of the true pioneers
in space rocketry and his work in support of international cooperation in the peaceful uses of Space.

On October 31 1936, 70 years ago, the first rocket
motor tests were carried out at Caltech by a group
of graduate students and rocketeers under the leadership
of my father, Frank.J.Malina. Just nine
years later, on Oct 11, 1945, the group launched
the WAC-Corporal from the White Sands Missile
Range to an altitude of 235,000 feet, the first man
made object to reach outer space. Subsequently the
WAC-Corporal was launched as the second stage
on a captured V2 rocket and reached an altitude of
244 miles.
In this International Academy of Astronautics Plenary
Lecture, I would like to celebrate the work of
one of the key pioneers of the space age through the
personal testimonial of a second-generation space
explorer. My own career is in space astronomy,
and when I was a graduate student, the rocket carrying my telescope for my Ph.D. in astronomy
was launched from the White Sands Missile Range
where my father's group had launched the WACCorporal
thirty years before. I grew up in a home
whose garden fence was at least as far as the edge
of the solar system. A frequent visitor to our home
was Theodore Von Karman, my fathers's Ph.D. advisor,
and one of the foremost applied mathematicians
of the twentieth century. During the 1950s
and 1960s, as the International Astronautical Federation
and the International Academy of Astronautics
were founded, many current IAA and IAF
members were friends and colleagues of my parents,
Frank and Marjorie.
My father embarked on research in rocket propulsion
fired by an unreasonable desire to launch rockets
into outer space for the purposes of exploration.
Overtaken by events during the second world war,
he and his colleagues put all their energy into the war effort. In the closing years of the war they were
able in nine months to design, build and launch
the WAC-Corporal, realising their student dreams.
After the war was over, Frank Malina decided that
his place was in Europe helping to create new structures
for peace, and was one of the founders of UNESCO
and the IAA. He then went on to a career
as a professional artist, as a pioneer of what became
known as Kinetic Art, and then as the editor
of the first international journal dealing with the
interaction of the arts, sciences and technology, the
Leonardo Journal.
The subtitle that I would like to give my talk is
"New Leonardos, New Medicis "for indeed making
things happen requires not only the teamwork of
individuals with overlapping passions and different
talents, but also the confluence of historical circumstances
and sponsors that allows new ideas to be
sustained by individuals and organisations in the
societies we live in.
This paper will be a personal testimonial that
overviews my father's many faceted career. My
father among other things left behind copious
archives now at the Caltech, JPL and the Library of
Congress as well as several "memoirs" which documented
in detail his recollection of the rocket work
during the 1930s and 1940s (1). Von Karman's autobiography
(2) as well as some more recent books
(3) and articles (4) provide other views of my father's
work in astronautics. In this paper I would
like to balance a description of his work as a rocket
pioneer, which are well documented in the astronautical
history literature, with details of his work
in international collaboration and also in the artworld.
In my view, my father's lasting legacy are
in these three areas of rocketry and astronautics,
international collaboration in both the science and
art world, and his own work as a pioneer the new
technological art forms of the new century.

Frank Joseph Malina was born in Brenham, Texas,
U.S.A. on October 2, 1912. His parents were Frank
Malina, a Czech immigrant, and Caroline Marek,
also of Czech origin (5). He had one sister, Caroline
Mercer who worked as an industrial psychologist
in Texas. In 1920, the Malina family returned
to the new republic of Czechoslovakia, where they ran a hotel and restaurant. The travels through
the devastation of post WWI Central Europe were
important events in Malina's childhood.
In 1925 the family returned to Texas because the
social and economic situation in Czechoslovakia
was discouraging; in addition Malina was showing
exceptional academic abilities; The family felt
that they should return to the U.S.A. where suitable
schooling could be found. He completed High
School in Brenham, Texas. He obtained a Bachelor
of Science from the Texas Agricultural and Mechanical
College which was then a small land grant
college run on military lines. Already in 1933 he
wrote for his technical English course he wrote that
now that man had conquered air travel his imagination
had turned to interplanetary travel. The perceptive
English professor encouraged him to continue
his education by attending the California Institute
of Technology, and made this possible by
loaning travel funds to the young Malina.

Arriving At Caltech in 1934, he started with a
scholarship in Mechanical Engineering and obtained
his Masters degrees in Mechanical (1935)
an Aeronautical Engineering (1936), and a PhD in
Aeronautics in 1940. Malina quickly gravitated to
one of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory
(GALCIT) faculty members, Theodore von Karman.
Initially working as a graphical illustrator
for the textbooks Von Karman was writing, Malina
proposed to him to carry out a Ph.D. on rocket
propulsion. Karman became his mentor and PhD
advisor and subsequently his close colleague and
friend for the almost the next 30 years.
The origins of the rocket research group at Caltech
are well documented in my father's memoirs
and oral histories as well as the work of a number
of historians. The trigger was a seminar given by
William Bollay reviewing the publications by Eugene
Sanger in Vienna on the possibilities of rocket
powered aircraft. Stimulated by the seminar at
Caltech, two rocket enthusiasts, John W. Parsons
and Edward S. Forman, teamed up with Malina.
Parsons was a self trained chemist and Forman a
skilled mechanic; the two of them had been working
for some time on trying to build liquid and solid
rocket motors. In February 1936 Malina prepared a detailed program of work with the purpose of
launching a high altitude sounding rocket with a
plan for a combination of theoretical studies and experiments.
Soon after, in the spring of 1936, they
were joined by Amo Smith and Tsien Hsue-shen;
the so called "suicide squad" conducted a series of
rocket engine experiments on campus and eventually
on the Arroyo Seco behind Pasadena. In 1938
Malina and Smith published a paper on the performance
of a sounding rocket in the Journal of
Aeronatical Sciences, the first paper on rocket flight
published by what is now the AIAA. The group
rapidly came up with a number of inventions and
innovations in the design of rocket nozzles, composite
solid propellants and rocket design, such as the
regnerative cooling of the motors, and controlled
flight.
Later in 1938 their work came to the attention of
the US National Academy, which provided initial
funding, the first government funding of rocket research
in a US university. As the war effort ramped
up, the rocket research group at GALCIT grew
rapidly, and in particular developed the successful
line of Jet Assisted Take Off (JATO) units used
to shorten the required length of airplane runways
in the pacific theater and for takeoffs from aircraft
carriers. Under Frank J. Malina's leadership, the
rocket research group carried out a program of theoretical
analysis and experiments which led to the
launching in 1945 of the WAC-Corporal to a height
of 240,000 feet.
The rocket work initiated at Caltech had a number
of long term impacts on U.S and international space
engineering.
First was the influence of Theodore Von Karman
on the methodology of the group. Von Karman was
one of the foremost applied mathematicians of the
twentieth century. The close coupling of theoretical
understanding and lab and field experimentation
distinguished the work of the group and enabled it
rapidly to exploit and extend their expertise as new
design problems were confronted. This approach
extended to their innovations in the development
of new families of rocket propellants, such as the
intiial castable composite solid propellants and hypergolics,
many which are still in widespread use
today. The basic theory of rocket nozzles developed
by the group is the basis of subsequent nozzle theory.
Second was their working within the context of
an international research community disseminating
their work to their colleagues, open to good ideas
wherever they might be found. The weekly research
seminars at GALCIT were a continual source of
cross fertilisation and their reports on their work
not only attracted government funding, influenced
the work of others and attracted motivated collaborators.
Their approach is in clear distinction to
the German work under the Nazis in the 1930s,
or Robert Goddard's secretive approach under private
funding. Von Karman and his students in both
aeronautics and astronautics had a disproportionate
impact on international developments. One of
the most notable was the work of Tsien Hsue-shen
who subsequently went on to become the father of
the Chinese rocket program after being forced out
of the US during the McCarthy period.
Thirdly the institutional approach they took in setting
up JPL and Aerojet Engineering Co was innovative
on a university campus and left a lasting

The group thus initiated a number of organisational
approaches that proved to be successful and models
for other university based R and D programs. As
the war effort ramped up, the production requirements
for rockets quickly outgrew the context of
Caltech. The on campus research work eventually
laid the foundations for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
which Von Karman and Malina founded in
1943; there they taught the first courses in rocket
propulsion in any US university. Malina directed
JPL from 1944 to 1946 after von Karman took a
leave of absence from JPL in 1944. JPL became
one of the models for University managed mission
labs growing to over 3000 employees, at the same
time as the DOE labs managed by the University
of California were established.
In parallel, Malina and Von Karman and their
colleagues Martin Sommerfield, Parsons, Forman
founded the Aerojet General Corporation to mass
produce and commercialise their rocket research.
The founders pooled an initial investement of 250
dollars each and the company was incorporated by
A.G. Haley. The establishment of Aerojet was undertaken over opposition both from the University
and from the Government sponsors. Such
university-corporate coupling to exploit the results
of applied research is now a basic strategy of most
US research universities. The rocket group at Caltech
proved to be an institutional innovator in both
the establishment of JPL and in setting up a company
to carry out the production work and commercialisation
of their R and D.

In 1946, at the end of World War II, Malina made
a decisive decision to join UNESCO, at the invitation
of its first Director General Julian Huxley.
Malina had toured Europe for the War Department
visiting the European research institutions and had
reported for the Ordnance Department at a meeting
of the preparatory commission of UNESCO. Intrigued
by the vision and drive of the group that
Huxley had gathered together, and discouraged by
the way that rocket research in the US was being
oriented towards delivery of nuclear weapon and a
preparation for future wars, he accepted Huxley's
offer against the advice of his colleagues in California.
He took up a post in Paris in Christmas
1946 becoming the deputy director for science and
in 1951 became head of the science division.
From 1946 to 1953, Malina worked in various
projects in international cooperation ranging from
projects in the Negev desert to the Hylean Amazon,
from arid zone research to international computing
centers. He helped organise meetings of scientists
such as the first UNESCO Symposium on Desert
Reclamation in Algeria and other symposia in India
and other countries. During this time he maintained
contact with Von Karman who at the time
was helping set up AGARD, the Advisory group
for Aeronautical Research and Development, for
NATO and other international post WWII organisations.
Not long after Malina left UNESCO, my father was
deprived of his U.S. passport as a result of being
swept up in some of the investigations of the Mc-
Carthy hearings. He was philosophically bitter that
the Nazi engineers had become US space heroes but
the founders of US rocketry who had dedicated the
war years to working for the Allies had been dispersed
with Tsien in China and himself in Paris and Parsons similarly deprived of security clearance.
The U.S decision to champion the Peenemunde
group had been in the face of parralel Russian
enlisting of Nazi research assets not only because
of the technical innovations of the Germans but in
a forerunner of cold war competition.

Malina remained involved in international collaborations
projects. When the IAF was founded beginning
in 1949, Malina was hard at work in UNESCO
but when Von Karman contacted him again
in 1959 he worked with him to establish the International
Academy of Astronautics and served as its
Director in 1963 after Karman's death. In August
1960, before Kennedy announced the moon program
in 1961, my father established the IAA committee
for a Lunar International Laboratory,L.I.L.,
with Bernard Lovell as vice chairman. Later he set
up the Committee for Manned Research on Celestial
Bodies to study among things ideas for Martian
exploration. He championed a broad view of
the IAA's mandate to work with scientists and engineers
internationally in all disciplines relevant to
the future of astronautics but also in the role of the
IAA serving as an umbrella for long range thinking
on topics not yet within the purvue of national
agencies. He played an important role in both
the History of Astronautics Committee and was a
strong supporter or the Committee for the Search
for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence at a time when
few national agencies or academies had this long
view of SETI; a field that has now blossomed with
the discovery of numerous exoplanets and the establishment
of exobiology. Clearly Malina brought
to bear his experience in international scientific organising
that he developed during this years at UNESCO,
maintaining a deep value in the importance
of free international scientific contact even during
the most polarising periods of the cold war.

In 1953, Malina decided to leave UNESCO and to
paint full time. At roughly the same time he became
independently wealthy through the stock he
still owned in Aerojet ( all the other founders had
sold their stock). He started working in conventional
painting, but often incorporating a subjectmatter familiar to scientists, ranging from the test
tubes and electronic circuits of the laboratory to
the technological landscape of electric pylons and
rocket trajectories, to the imagery from fluid dynamics
and wind tunnels. He stated: "In regard
to subject matter, there is still a strong entrenched
belief that only certain aspects of life and of the
Universe are "poetic". Since most artists are encultured
by a literary type of education, it is perhaps
not surprising that so few venture away from terrestial
landscape, pots and pans and animals"(6).
After experimenting rapidly with a large number
of styles, he began incorporating mixed-media in
his work. He created assemblages including string,
electric wire and wire mesh. The use of wire
mesh immediately led him to experiment with the
"Moire" effect, and this to a whole series of experiments
in creating optical effects. This again was a
revelation to him, for suddenly he realised that his
experiments in art could make use of the research
in vision that were being studied by psychologists
and cognitive scientists, yet which were ignored by
artists at the time. Some of his works from this
period would now be called Op'Art.
Another revelation occurred one day when he
was having trouble getting enough contrast in the
"Moire" effect of one of his wire mesh pieces. In
frustration, he held a 50W light bulb behind the
mesh. However, in a few minutes the heat from the
lamp caused a column of smoke to rise from the
painting ; he concluded that after all electric light
was unsuitable for us in art objects. A few months
later, in his studio, he noticed the string of electric
lights that had been removed from the Christmas
tree and realised the solution to the problem. He
made his first electric light picture in 1955, "Illuminated
Wire Mesh Moire".
Reading Malina's experimentation in art and new
technologies immediately recalls the early days of
the "Suicide Squad" when the young rocket engineers
laid the ground work for a long term rocket
research program. Just as Jack Parsons had stumbled
on a new kind of rocket fuel, the composite
fuel, by noticing the physical properties of roofing
asphalt, so Malina viewed art making as a research
activity that could draw on all aspects of contemporary
science and technology.
Malina showed his electropaintings in the Salon des
R´ealit´es Nouvelles in 1955 and held a one-artistshow in the same year. It was the first exhibition
of Kinetic art using electric light held in Paris.
Working with electronic engineer Jean Villmer, Malina
developed an electromechanical system which
he called the "Lumidyne " system (7). that allowed
motion and light as a plastic medium under
the control of the artist. He invented also an
audio-kinetic system where the motion of the disks
was coupled to microphones which picked up ambient
sound, forerunners of the interactive computer
arts of the 1990s. The visual phenomena that Malina
explored were predecessors of the experiments
in computer art that began later in the 1960s and
1970s.
Malina himself often used imagery from outer space
as subject matter, although many viewers could not
recognise the inspiration of the compositions. In
"Away from the Earth" (1966), for instance, the
basis of the composition is the trajectory of the
Apollo capsule from the earth to the moon. Malina
stated : "The exiting of a representative of earth's
civilisation into outer space can, for significance,
be compared with our ancestors' descent from the
trees. The psychological and philosophical consequences
of this move may be tremendous for the future
development of mankind... What canvas will
hang on the walls of space ships ploughing space's
waves ?".
One footnote of interest is that Malina also tried
to commercialise his inventions and research in
art as he had done through Aerojet. He founded
the Electro Lumidyne International (ELI) and obtained
some contracts in the advertising business as
well as a research grant from RCA. Unlike Aerojet,
ELI never turned a profit.

As he worked as professional artist, he could not
help but notice how the working conditions and environment
of the artist differed from those he had
experienced as a scientist and engineer. Working
scientists always wrote about their own work in
professional journals ; they were always the first
interpreters of their ideas. In art, there seemed to
be no professional journals where artists were allowed
to write about their work. Malina felt that
he had new and valuable ideas in his Lumidyne
system, yet in the art world he would have to find a critic to write about the work and often artists
were very secretive about their techniques. As he
started working in the new medium of kinetic art,
Malina wanted to research the technical inventions
of other artists, but there were no journals where
artists exchanged such useful information. Indeed,
it was very difficult to even find the work of predecessors
in the technological media such as Thomas
Wilfred.
As an engineer, he had been trained by von Karman
to apply ideas and techniques from all the available
disciplines of science and to work in open international
collaboration, yet artists seemed to be
totally isolated from many major intellectual developments
of the century. Lord Snow's characterisation
of the Two Cultures had validity at a
very practical level. New discoveries in materials
sciences, psychology of vision, physics, and technology
surely were relevant to the art of the future,
yet art journals were usually devoid of any discussion
of these topics. Artists rarely read the work
of aestheticians, philosophers or historians as there
seemed to be no connections from art theory to the
work of professional artists. And whereas in the
technical fields, professional societies existed to allow
individuals with similar research interests to
exchange expertise, in the arts there were societies
of critics but not meaningful societies of working
artists internationally. In the sciences every scientist
felt part of an international enterprise, while
in the arts artists rarely had any contact outside
their own circle of friends. In effect, artists were
marginalised, and totally at the mercy of the commercial
and museum system. It was not a situation
which accorded with his view of the role of the
artist, or the future of art.
These ideas led Malina to found the new art journal
"Leonardo" in 1967. This was to be a journal for
contemporary artists where the artists themselves
would write about their own work. It would be a
journal of ideas where artists could exchange information
and obtain information. There would be
articles by researchers in all other disciplines which
had bearings on the arts and the journal would
have an international scope. He took the idea to
Robert Maxwell owner of Pergamon Press and who
had been publishing the IAA journal Astronautica
Acta.
The Leonardo Journal has now been published for 40 years and is the leading international scholarly
journal which addresses these issues. When Malina
had founded the Leonardo Journal he saw it as
the visible manifestation of a network of scientistartists,
a vision now fully realised through the organisation,
Leonardo-The International Society for
the Arts, Sciences and Technology which assumed
responsibility for Leonardo Journal after Malina's
death.

I have been honored to be asked to write a tribute
in the memory of my father Frank J. Malina at this
2006 Plenary of the IAA.
It seems clear to me that there are unlikely to be
individuals like Leonardo da Vinci who today can
really make major contributions in so many different
spheres of human activity. Today, achievements
of this kind are more likely to arise from teams of
individuals working together. This requires new
ways or working together, new professional structures
and educational systems. In the sciences and
engineering more than ever this is the norm. In
the arts and humanities, this is now also common,
enabled in many cases by the new global communication
networks. I believe that my father perceived
that to create a saner world we would have to work
differently across disciplines and cultures. He and
his generation hoped that the spread of a scientific
humanism would be the enabling condition for
peaceful co existence.
At the same time, there is always a vital need for
individuals with vision to drive forward to new solutions
and creations. The generation of my father
was traumatised by two World Wars, and many of
them have identified themselves as survivors and
dedicated themselves to creating the structures for
a different world. Their vision is often illogically
optimistic and generous. Many, like my father,
have the courage to change careers, to reeducate
themselves in new fields and to work towards a
better future in a present which in many ways is
threatening.
I think my father would have been encouraged
by the resurgence of private initiatives for space
launchers and space tourism, led by entrepreneurs
and students with other visions than military or
governmental for the future of space exploration He would have been pleased to see that the development
of vigorous space programs in China, India,
Europe, Brazil and other developing countries
in addition to the U.S.A. He would urge us to find
ways to work differently in international cooperation
so that our profession can contribute to solving
problems on earth, to expanding human civilisation
into space but in so doing create the conditions for
a more peaceful and saner world.

(1) There is an extensive Frank J. Malina
web site at http://www.olats.org /pionniers/
malina/malina.php . His personal papers
are archived at the U.S. Library of Congress.
Selected papers were microfiched by the California
Institute of Technology and have been published
by Microforms International, Fairview Park,
Elmsford, N.Y. See also the Ph.D. Thesis by Dr
Benjamin Zibit "The Guggenheim Aeronautical
Laboratory at Caltech and the creation of the
Modern Rocket Motor: How the Dynamics of
Rocket Theory became Reality", City University
of NY, February 1999.
(2) H.L. Dryden, The Contributions of Theodore
von Karman : a Review", Astronaut. Aerospace.
Eng., 1, p. 12, 1963. See also von Karman's autobiography/
Th v Karman with L.Edson, The Wind
and Beyond, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967).
(3) The role of Tsien is documented in I Chang,
The Thread of the Silkworm, (New York: Basic
Books, 1995).
A number of books have highlighted the role of
John Parsons including Strange Angel by George
Pendel (Orlando: Harcourt Inc, 2005) and J.
Carter, Sex and Rockets: The OccultWorld of Jack
Parsons.( Feral House, )
A third book looks in detail at the history of JPL,
Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science, M.
G. Lord (New York: Walker, 2005)and ncludes an
assesment of the role of Frank Malina.
(4) For attribute to Frank J. Malina's work in astronautics
see"A Tribute to Frank J. Malina ", G.S.
James and F.H. Winter, Acta Astronautica , 10, p.
231, 1983
(5) The Malina family can be traced back to 1630
in the small Moravian town of Horny Becva.
(6) F.J.Malina, "Reflections of an artist-engineer
on the art-science interface", Impact of Science on
Society, Vol 24, No 1, p19, 1974.
(7) F.J.Malina, "Kinetic Painting: The Lumidyne
System", Leonardo, Vol 1, p22, 1968.