Escape from Earth: A Secret History of the Space Rocket

by Fraser MacDonald

The long-buried truth about the dawn of the Space Age: lies, spies, socialism, and sex magick.

Los Angeles, 1930s: Everyone knows that rockets are just toys, the stuff of cranks and pulp magazines. Nevertheless, an earnest engineering student named Frank Malina sets out to prove the doubters wrong. With the help of his friend Jack Parsons, a grandiose and occult-obsessed explosives enthusiast, Malina embarks on a journey that takes him from junk yards and desert lots to the heights of the military-industrial complex.

Malina designs the first American rocket to reach space and establishes the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But trouble soon finds him: the FBI suspects Malina of being a communist. And when some classified documents go missing, will his comrades prove as dependable as his engineering?
Drawing on an astonishing array of untapped sources, including FBI documents and private archives, Escape From Earth tells the inspiring true story of Malina's achievements - and the political fear that's kept them hidden. At its heart, this is an Icarus tale: a real life fable about the miracle of human ingenuity and the frailty of dreams.

Genres: Nonfiction, Space, History, Science

384 pages, Hardcover

First published June 25, 2019

About the author

Fraser MacDonald (b. 1972) was educated at the University of Glasgow (BSc in Geography) and Oxford (MSc, DPhil). He lives in Edinburgh and teaches at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Escape from Earth: A Secret History of the Space Rocket (Profile, 2019) and writes for the London Review of Books.

Reviews

[Chrystopher’s Archive · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNFing at 38% for almost entirely me-not-you reasons.

I sometimes found the timeline confusing, as I felt the author hopped back and forth between years, especially when covering the WWII years. There was also a certain amount of whiplash between dry technical details and the salacious details of the messy personal lives of the main players.

The book was well written with a pleasant narrative voice, and the story itself was an interesting one.
Ultimately though, (aside form being in a reading slump that I just can't seem to shake) I just wasn't as interested in the topic as I thought I would be.

I would actually recommend this for history nerds and people interested in a lesser known side of 20th century science.

[Meteorite_cufflink · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5
A little dry and long-winded.

[Don Fisk · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is very interesting that Fraser Macdonald can introduce a lot of detail of people, names, meetings, etc and definitely NOT become tedious to read. His journalistic prose style is easy and enjoyable. The book concerns Frank Malina, "the father of US rocketry". Frank's parents were Czechoslovakian refugees from the Nazi's, who settled in the rather remote Texas town of Brenham, where Frank was born.

Frank found his way to CALTECH where quite a few of his circle were seriously anti-fascist, with good reason, being refugees from the Nazi's, and the book is much concerned with the way in which many of the anti-fascists who flirted with the communist party as a means of expressing their anti-fascism became entangled with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, and the ruthless FBI. Am reminded of Janis Ian who (if I remember correctly) said that because her father had been a wobbly they had their own assigned FBI agent, who they waved to on the way to school. Much of the reasoning used by the FBI seems very much guilt by association - association established by eg. the tiniest offhand remark from an "informer". Unfortunately, as Fraser makes clear, the pursuit of those with communist affiliation had some justification, as, while smearing many innocent people, also caught some who actually passed detailed plans to the Soviets.

This smearing has resulted in Frank's achievements in rocketry being effectively obscured from US history. Obviously significant rocket propulsion is not just a scaled up Guy Fawkes rocket. Working for CALTECH Frank got the agreement from his boss, Theodore von Karman (notably of "Mathematical Methods in Engineering" by Karman and Biot - a book familiar to many engineering students of an earlier era) to do trials of various propellants - and with the ebullient explosives experimenter Jack Parsons amongst others, on a dry creekbed in the Arroyo Seco canyon (Los Angeles), tentative experiments began. Quite a bit of mathematical modelling on propellant burn area and rates, nozzle size, etc and some years more experimentation with different liquid and solid fuels, Jack arrived at a very stable, castable solid propellant of potassium perchlorate in asphalt.

Early success was an almost commoditised little rocket, the JATO, which was proven as a boost engine on aircraft (first tested on Ercoupe and Douglas AA-20A) - useful for takeoff on a short runway in war conditions.

Strangely Jack Parsons was also involved with an Aleister Crowley cult which indulged in weird vaguely erotic ceremonies (OTO - Ordo Templi Orientis, Gnostic Mass...), so the daft communist party wasn't the only distraction. Sadly Jack met his fate when mixing mercury fulminate with other stuff in a coffee can while filling a bespoke order for one of his customers.

On 11th October 1945 at White Sands, Chihuahua, the WAC Corporal successfully reached 70km, a tremendous feat. Officially, though, the V2 and the Nazi team led by Wernher von Braun were considered the only game in town, and overshadowed everything else. Corporals continued to be used for various purposes, and in 1949 a Corporal stage on top of a V2 was used to reach 400km.

Quote:
This is the story of how Malina and a close circle of friends pursued two strains of twentieth-century optimism. These were connected in remarkable ways, not least in that the purposes of both movements became corrupted, and many of the advocates were persecuted and forgotten. If this has been largely a hidden story, the responsibility for its concealment lies as much with the radical rocketeers as with the US space and security establishment.

(a) If your interest here is principally rockets and mathematics then this is probably not the book for you.
(b) Fraser tests your memory, as events are not entirely chronological, and you have to keep up!

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Actually, I stalled out in the middle of the book, when there was so much about Jack Parsons and the cultish (and occultish) relationships & activities surrounding him. Though it was interesting to hear about the crossover with L Ron Hubbard and Scientology.

The story I wanted to know more about was Frank Malina and Theodore von Karman. The book delivered, especially toward the end. Fascinating & complicated history of our space race, intertwined with 20th century political views.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating read that essentially provides a professional and personal biography of American rocket pioneer, Frank Malina, in the social and political context beginning in the 1930s. The author appears to have done his homework by building on the tangential work off others while ferreting out primary sources material in FBI files and the correspondence and journals of key people.

[Luz Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the story has everything from rockets to spionage, the book was very hard to follow at times.
But in general I am happy to know now more about Malina's llife and contributions to the american space race.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd book, very focused on the personal lives of the protagonists, more than the science, engineering or politics surrounding early space flight. The various cults and misdemeanours make it an entertaining book, but not necessarily a relevant one.

[Alice Scalco · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story is very captivating, although I expected more science content vs. politics. At times, you can get lost with names and dates, but overall a nice and unexpected book

[Behrooz Parhami · Rating 4 out of 5]

MacDonald presents a captivating history of early American space exploration, which includes lies, spies, and (fear of) socialism in 1930s Pasadena, before and after Cal Tech's 1936 founding of Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL is now officially a part of NASA, but it is still being run by Cal Tech. A key influence in the founding of JPL was Frank Malina [1912-1981], an engineer whose life and contributions were shrouded in mystery. Assisted by Jack Parsons [1914-1952], a friend with no college degree but with intense interest in explosives, Malina launched the first high-altitude rocket in the US.

MacDonald upends the standard narrative about US space history, which invariably entails mention of Robert H. Goddard's liquid-fueled rockets that didn't go very far and Werner von Braun's V-2 rockets that did reach space. The history then proceeds to the Soviet Sputnik and a frightened US playing catch-up and putting astronauts on the Moon.

MacDonald was drawn to this subject when he heard of the work of Frank Malina, a little-known engineer who aspired to build an experimental program for designing a viable rocket. The Malina/Parsons team was at first made up of technologists and tinkerers, but Malina, inspired and guided by mathematician/physicist/engineer Theodore von Karman [1881-1963], later recruited theoretically-inclined people into the program. Malina was convinced that building a rocket is very complicated and the big team it needs would be beyond the scope of a university undertaking, hence the impetus to found JPL.

When Malina arrived in Los Angeles and began working at Cal Tech, he was terrified by the rise of fascism. He supported labor unions, especially as they championed the cause of migrant workers. His advocacy for change drew him to membership in the Communist Party, an ironic turn of events, given that he later climbed to the height of the US military-industrial complex and became the first space-millionaire as a result of founding a company, Aerojet, with Jack Parsons. Malina is responsible for making rocketry respectable, something that is done by serious engineers, rather than attracting only wackos.

Malina and Parsons tested their first rocket in 1936. The 1945 "WAC Corporal" was the first rocket to reach really high altitude. Then, a 1947 executive order allowed FBI to look into the lives of engineers and scientists on the smallest of suspicions. FBI was concerned about the presence of activist engineers at JPL. It wasn't a matter of politics, but loyalty. Jewish, Chinese, and other engineers were pursued. Many engineers lost their licenses, and some ended up in jail.

In 1967, FBI finally decided to pursue Malina seriously, prompting him to flea to France, where he got a job with UNESCO. Later, the US pressured UNESCO to fire Malina, which ironically coincided with him becoming a millionaire as a result of selling his Aerojet company. We now know that Parsons was one of FBI's confidential informants, providing information about Malina and others.

I attended a Cal Tech talk on Thursday, March 24, 2022, in which the book, its significance, and the author's sources were discussed, as Erik Conway, JPL's official historian, interviewed MacDonald. Escape from Earth is based on the contents of archives at Cal Tech & JPL (the latter maintains its own archives) and FBI files, alongside Malina family information & documents that supplemented project-related material at the two archives and dossiers released by FBI.

[Brittany · Rating 1 out of 5]

I put this book on my to-read list thinking it was about early rocketry in the US and how it lead to the space race. It's not really about rocketry at all, and though mentions the space race the author makes no effort to actually connect the two or showcase how one became the other.

It wants to be a biography of Frank Malina, a US scientist who was also a communist. It wants to be full of intrigue and mystery and suspense....but is so dreadfully boring and all the "mystery" is ridiculously straight forward.

The author also casts an absurdly wide net over the people around Malina, devoting way too much time to others who are sometimes only loosely involved in either communism or rocketry. There's much made of how history has "forgotten" Malina and his friend Jack Parsons, but for the former there's really not much to tell, and for the latter...who wants to remember a sexually abusive psychopath who terrorized women and teenage boys alike? The sections devoted to Parsons' involvement in a deranged magic/sex cult were totally unnecessary for this book and were absolutely disgusting.

This is a book about communism in the 1930's in America and, though there is opportunity to, the author doesn't really make an effort to set the tone of the era at all.

Dreadful. If I didn't have such OCD about finishing books I would have stopped a quarter of the way through. Thank God I got it from the library and didn't spend money on this.

[Hal F · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riveting book, carefully researched and well written. Incredible story including technical innovation, Communism and a sex cult: wilder than fiction. Especially eye-opening (to me) was the fervor of Communism in pockets around the country, including Cal Tech where a lot of the early action takes place. I knew a reasonable amount about McCarthyism and his trumped-up anti-Communism, but little about the movement that led to it. This book follows a handful of key folks in the development of early rocketry, including the impact that their ideology had as McCarthyism swept the nation.

Utterly fascinating book, engagingly told.

[Julian Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Am extraordinary story of technology, rocket science and the stranger than fiction people who prepared the way for space exploration.

At times the lives in this book seems to delve into unbelievably weird worlds, but the author never loses sight of the achievements they made.

A fascinating read of some incredible characters whom history has largely forgotten and yet to whom we owe a huge debt of technological gratitude - even if we find some of the stranger things in their private lives alarmingly unusual.

[Tom Long · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would have preferred about 20% more science content, but it tells a remarkable story.

[Mehsaan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intriguing read, Frank Malina deserves so much more recognition as one of the pioneers of the US Space Industry!

[Sue Dounim · Rating 4 out of 5]

As usual a single number is not enough to rate this work. As a thoroughly researched reference work, this rates 5, as a work of general interest, 4, with the caveat that some of the minute details might even get a skim from even a serious reader.
I got to this book via Sex and Rockets, then Strange Angel, since I was interested in Jack Parsons, his early history of rocketry experimentation in Pasadena, while he was a member of Aleister-Crowley linked O.T.O. occult group.
If that's the extent of your interest, the two above books should suffice. But Escape from Earth greatly broadens the scope, and gets into the details of the collision of academic rocket research at Caltech (and indeed the whole USA) and Cold War paranoia about the USSR. The author makes it clear that there was indeed a threat from the Soviet Union, due to infiltration of American Communist Party cells, study groups, etc. in which American technology was actually transferred to the USSR.
This is a fascinating part of US history, incorporating on one hand the beginnings of post-Nazi rocket research in the US, through McCarthyism and the origins of JPL. It focuses on little-known rocket scientist Frank Malina, protege of Theodore von Karman of Caltech and friend of wild man and explosives and chemical wizard Jack Parsons. The GALCIT group, later JPL, was the group that extended the V-2 technology brought to the US by German scientists in Operation Paperclip to rockets that could actually reach outer space.
The author goes to great efforts to get at original FBI and other documents, and had access to a huge archive of previously unpublished personal letters by Frank Malina and his circle.
This may not be a book you need on your shelf, but I highly recommend it if you have more than a passing interest in the birth and development of rocket research in the US, JPL, as well as the history of the Red Scare, McCarthyism, and weaponization of the FBI against actual and suspected spies and Soviet sympathizers

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've had some awareness for awhile about how, in the early days of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab, it was something of a hotbed of unconventional politics and social attitudes. This mostly being from the perspective of Jack Parsons (the notorious occultist) or Qian Xuesen, who was cast out of the United States, only to wind up presiding over the PRC's rocket program. While those men are important in this book, the essential focus is on Frank Malina, the man who was main technologist behind modern, high-power, solid-fueled rockets, besides being (along with Parsons), the founder of the Aerojet Corporation.

The question MacDonald has with Malina, seeing as he managed to avoid the worst of the "Red Scare" crackdown by going into exile, was the extent of his commitment to "Socialism as it is," and the government that embodied it, or whether he was mostly an anti-fascist and a genuine believer in internationalism who was latching onto the best available option. MacDonald's suspicion was that there was a serious intellectual interest at the time, but that Malina was too skeptical of state power to really be a security risk. That said, MacDonald also doesn't treat Malina, Powers, and Qian (among others) as naïfs, as they were involved in a security-sensitive situation where they were taking risks by even appearing to compromise themselves. MacDonald's main point being that, at this point in time, we ought to be able to handle a situation where there were shades of grey about personal motivation.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Goddard creates rocketry in the US in the 1920s, then sorta ex-nazi Werner Von Braun shows up in the 50s creates NASA then puts men on the moon.
Turns out that isn't true, between the two rocketry really took off in SoCal and involved communists, trial and error, creation of JPL, L. Ron Hubbard lots of explosions and Alistair Crowley. What else would you expect from the area that gave us Disney, Manson, Trader Joe's, drag racing and The Doors.
Terrific weird history of real story of our first steps to outer space.

[Kristine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, I was grateful for the opportunity to learn about lesser-known elements in the history of rocketry in the United States. On the other hand, the book focuses very little on actual rocketry and more on tabloid-like stories of cults and communist witch hunts, with many repeated passages and weak structure.

[Luke Tipton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Highly captivating. A little tedious at times.
Ultimatley, the value of Escape From Earth comes from the fact that Frank Malina's exact story is told in this detail nowhere else.
The tremendous amount research that went into Escape From Earth is very evident.

[Christopher Law · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not enough science in this book and too much waffle about the various personalities with connections to the subject. Confusing. Boring.

[Bill Kimrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF. Disappointed that it was much more focused on political activities than on advances in rocketry.

[Pezquenin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very few pages about rockets and science, many many pages about the different characters associated with rocket development and their involvement with the Communist Party and weird sects/cults.
Lots of gossip and uninteresting facts related to Malina's correspondence.
And guess what? More and more data about who joined the Communist Party and when, who went to meetings at somebody else's house to talk about politics and very un-rocketry topics.
Disappointing read for me.