![]() ![]() ![]() JPL may be well known but its founder Frank Malina is not the household name he deserves to be. The founders of JPL – Caltech aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán and his PhD student Frank Malina – wanted none of the cultural baggage of the R-word, they just wanted to get into space without breathless media speculation. The problem with “rocket” was that the word was so often synonymous with cranks and fantasists, people who were more into sci-fi than sober science. Few people these days talk of “jet propulsion” even when the phrase emerged in 1943, it was a euphemism for a word that engineers worried might get the public a little too excited: “rocket”. But this kind of careful language runs deep in JPL’s institutional history – starting with its own name. A pattern of hydrated salts called “recurring slope lineae” doesn’t, to be honest, sound quite so refreshing. The recent announcement of a discovery on Mars may have been big news but NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) were still a little coy about calling it “water”.
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