Frank Malina

Frank Malina was an American aeronautical engineer who, as a Caltech graduate student in the 1930s, persuaded his advisor Theodore von Karman to support a student rocketry research group, nicknamed the Suicide Squad for its early accident-prone experiments, that carried out its work in the remote Arroyo Seco canyon that later grew into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Working alongside colleagues including Jack Parsons and, later, the Chinese engineer Qian Xuesen, Malina helped develop the WAC Corporal sounding rocket, which in 1945 became the first American rocket to exceed an altitude of fifty miles, and in 1942 he co-founded the Aerojet Corporation with von Karman to manufacture rocket motors. He served as JPL's second director from 1944 to 1946 before leaving rocket research in 1947 over concerns about the weaponization of the technology he had helped develop. He then joined UNESCO in Paris, eventually leading its scientific research division, and in 1968 founded Leonardo, a peer-reviewed journal exploring the intersection of art, science and technology that continues publication today.