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This chapter covers rocket development in the United States before, during, and shortly after World War II at what became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Pasadena, California. Topics discussed include the development of jet-assisted takeoff (JATO), the ORDCIT (Ordnance-California Institute of Technology) contract, the Corporal projects, and the JPL management structure.

During the Cold War, NASA became the largest funder of climate research in the United States, and a major player in the Earth sciences more generally. When NASA was created after the launch of Sputnik, though, Congress gave the agency a very limited role in atmospheric science. But as the Cold War waxed and waned, the agency gained for itself a much broader “mission,” to study the Earth, with profound consequences for the Earth and planetary sciences.

This chapter focuses on developments at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory after World War II. Until the mid-1950s, the main efforts in the evolution of large surface-to-surface missiles in the United States focused on liquid propellants. This changed in the mid- to late 1950s with the Polaris and Minuteman programs. Those two missiles inaugurated a major shift in ballistic-missile technology away from liquids. After their successful development, most intermediate range and intercontinental ballistic missiles came to use solid propellants, freeing up many liquid-propellant missiles for modification and use as launch vehicles. In the meantime, as an array of achievements in solid-propellant rocket technology prepared the way for the breakthrough that enabled the success of the Polaris and Minuteman, they also led toward the use of solid-propellant boosters for a variety of launch vehicles—notably Titan III, Titan IV, and the space shuttles, but also Scout and upper stages for Delta.

The digitized copy of The Martian Chronicles, along with many other stories, novels, and science fiction art inspired by the Red Planet, finally reached Mars aboard the Phoenix lander in 2008. Chapter 43 describes Bradbury’s final trip to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory the following year, the publication of his last story collection, We’ll Always Have Paris (2008), and the passing of Don Congdon, his agent for more than sixty years. Bradbury had come to measure each story he finished as one more victory over death, but the stories were coming more slowly now. Bradbury’s reflections on mortality during the final decades of his life, and his unfinished plans for a final story collection, close out chapter 43.

In chapter 2, Bradbury enters the public debate over the curtailment of the Apollo program, beginning with his Los Angeles Times op-ed column, “Apollo Murdered: The Sun Goes Out.” For the moment, Bradbury placed more hope on unmanned Mars missions such as Mariner 9, and played a prominent role in the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mariner 9 events and book, Mars and the Mind of Man. Bradbury wrote the forward and the conclusion for this book, citing Arnold Toynbee’s concept of “challenge and response,” the need to face up to cultural challenges or face extinction, as the motivation for colonizing other worlds.

After returning home from Europe in 1978, Bradbury was unable to come to agreement with the Smithsonian over “The Ghosts of Forever,” an animated film fantasy tour of the various Smithsonian museums. Chapter 12 goes on to document how the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 journeys to the outer solar system prompted NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech to bring Bradbury back together with his “Mars and the Mind of Man” colleagues Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, and JPL director Bruce Murray to form the symposium “Jupiter and the Mind of Man.” The chapter also describes the uneven production and mixed reception of the NBC miniseries of The Martian Chronicles, and Bradbury’s Emmy-winning ABC collaboration with Malcolm Clarke on “Infinite Horizons: Space Beyond Apollo.”

This chapter discusses other American rocket efforts from 1930 to 1954, culminating in a joining of German and JPL rocket technologies in the Bumper WAC project. Goddard, with his small band of technicians, and Malina's Suicide Squad were far from the only early developers of liquid-propellant rockets in the United States. Among the many others, undoubtedly the most important in the period before World War II were the individuals associated with what became, in 1934, the American Rocket Society. The Bumper WAC project combined the V-2s with WAC Corporal B rockets in a two-stage configuration.