Frank J Malina

INSCRIPCIÓN WEB. Frank Malina fue un pionero de la Astronáutica, y también del arte y la tecnología como artista cinético. Empezando en la década de 1930, con su profesor de doctorado Theordore Von Karman fundó el Laboratorio de Propulsión a Chorro de la NASA, dirigió el equipo para el primer cohete exitoso de gran altitud de los EE.UU., la WAC Corporal, con el objetivo de desarrollar el acceso científico al espacio exterior.

Today marks what would have been the 100th birthday of my grandfather, Frank Malina. He co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was one of the pioneers of the US rocket program. His conscience led him away from working with rockets aft

er their application became primarily military, and he began a second career in Paris as an artist. His art has been one of my greatest inspirations. His experience in these disparate worlds brought him to foundLeonardo/ISAST, an international journal for the Arts and Sciences, still published over 40 years later by MIT Press. Hundreds of artists have had their work published in its pages, and innumerable connections between artists and scientists owe their existence to this work. My father, Roger F Malina, continues my grandfathers legacy and is the Editor-in-Chief of LEONARDO and a distinguished professor teaching classes on Art, Science and Technology at ATEC at UT Dallas.  I never met my grandfather. But more than just owing my very existence to him, I find I owe him a greater debt for the intellectual legacy he left my father and uncle, me, my siblings and our cousins. If you're interested at all in reading about him, or learning more on the connections between art and science he dedicated his life to encouraging, I hope you check out http://www.leonardo.info/, or look on YouTube for some of his art.  As a parting note, I hope you take to heart something Frank Malina showed so well - if it doesn't exist, create it! 

Image Courtesey of declassified FBI files on Frank J Malina.

Article from a blog post by Roger Malina with the same title:

Informant Number 11: 100 Years of Scientific Making in Celebration of Frank Malina

Roger F Malina, June 9 2012 DRAFT written for submission to HANDMADE ZINE ON CRITICALLY-ENGAGED MAKING by Garnet Hertz (in preparation).

My father, Frank Joseph Malina (1), was born a hundred years ago on October 2 1912 in Brenham, Texas. The son of Czech immigrants, his parents were music teachers, but had run grocery stores and a hotel; they wanted their son to be a musician. Music was a respectable profession; my father went on to become a rocket scientist, a field that was not respectable did not exist when he was born.

Brenham was a small farming community and my father tells of his boredom and finding refuge in the town library. There, among other books, he read Jules Verne and became infected with the dream of space travel. And to go to space you had to make things, invent things.

My father majored in mechanical engineering at Texas A and M and went on to study aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology, Caltech. There he started studying under Theodore Von Karman (2) who has started one of the first experimental aeronautics labs, a wind tunnel and the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory. Von Karman is now recognized as one of the top research engineers of the twentieth century but as a young professor he had a lot of resistance introducing scientific reasoning and mathematics into engineering practice. Engineering was often a trial and error affair; Von Karman believed that you could make things scientifically. My father went on to become a leading pioneering of American Rocketry and, with Von Karman, founder of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. The team led by my father is credited with launching the first human-made object into space.