![\"Frank](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/file-20260129-66-g77lnp.png\")
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This series is dedicated to little-known but highly influential scientists who have had a powerful influence on the careers and research paths of many others, including the authors of these articles.<\/p>\n
His exceptional approach leant a credibility to research at the intersection of art and technology, opening the door for generations who would follow in his footsteps \u2013 including my work in sound and music computing<\/a>, combining media engineering and music composition techniques to produce auditory displays.<\/p>\n Today, such systems for presenting information through sound are ubiquitous, from our mobile devices to our cars. Yet if it wasn\u2019t for the efforts of figures like Malina, building bridges between the arts and sciences, fields like mine wouldn\u2019t exist at all.<\/p>\n The suicide squad<\/p>\n Malina is said to have disappointed his musician father<\/a> when he expressed interest in science and maths as a child \u2013 eventually opting for a career in engineering. In 1935, two amateur rocket enthusiasts, Jack Parsons and Ed Forman, approached the young graduate student about forming a new rocket research group at the California Institute of Technology.<\/p>\n Parsons, the group\u2019s self-taught chemist, was an avowed occultist and a leading light within the Ordo Templi Orientis, an occult secret society that was headed by Aleister Crowley \u2013 the British occultist and ceremonial magician sometimes described as \u201cthe wickedest man in the world\u201d<\/a>. Forman was the mechanic and focused on the material construction of the rockets. Some early fumbles soon earned them the \u201csuicide squad\u201d tag.<\/p>\n Frank Malina was part of a team of rocket engineers who were dubbed \u2018the suicide squad\u2019. Video: Propulsion+<\/p>\n The unorthodox pair adopted an intuitive, hands-on approach to rocketry which relied heavily on trial-and-error, and resulted in more than a few near misses. Malina provided the academic rigour, ensuring that experiments were designed and carried out to a high scientific standard.<\/p>\n Rocketry was still considered science fiction as the world approached the brink of war in 1938, so Malina was careful to describe their approach as \u201cjet-assisted takeoff\u201d when pursuing the US military for funding.<\/p>\n In fact, Malina was an avowed pacifist who claimed reluctance at \u201cmaking rockets for murdering purposes\u201d. It might seem strange, then, that he would align himself with the US Army \u2013 but against the backdrop of rising global fascism, and limited options for funding, he had few other options to pursue his engineering ambitions.<\/p>\n Declared a fugitive<\/p>\n Having been thoroughly convinced of the complete failure of capitalism by his experiences of the Great Depression, Malina became a member of the Communist Party of the United States in 1938 \u2013 holding meetings at his home until the early 1940s as war raged across Europe.<\/p>\n Frank Malina with a high-altitude Wac Corporal rocket in 1946. But this proved problematic as he rose up the ranks of Nasa\u2019s newly founded Jet Propulsion Laboratory. By the time he took over as director in 1944, he was coming under increased surveillance from the FBI, who had been watching him<\/a> since Parsons \u2013 secretly an FBI informant<\/a> \u2013 had reported Malina\u2019s communist associations in 1942.<\/p>\n After the war, Malina became increasingly distressed with attempts by the army at JPL to co-opt his rocket designs to deliver nuclear weapons \u2013 confiding this to his psychoanalyst, who was also monitoring him for the FBI.<\/p>\n Malina became aware of the FBI\u2019s investigations after a run-in with an agent on a train journey in 1945. Increasingly disillusioned with the weaponisation of his rocketry research, he left for Europe in 1947 to take up the position with the new international agency Unesco<\/a> in Paris. As its deputy science director<\/a>, he hoped to find a more peaceful way of furthering the common global good through science.<\/p>\n In the US, he was branded a traitor as McCarthy era tensions<\/a> heightened. At the height of this \u201cred scare\u201d in 1952, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had him indicted and declared a fugitive, and his passport was revoked.<\/p>\n Pushing the possibilities of art<\/p>\n Throughout his scientific career, Malina produced paintings and drawings in his spare time. In 1953, at the age of 41, Malina resigned from Unesco to pursue a full-time career as an artist in Paris.<\/p>\n Initially, he explored the moir\u00e9 effect<\/a>, meticulously crafting overlapping grids of wire mesh, steel cords and metal components to reveal unique patterns when viewed from different angles. The Mus\u00e9e d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris soon acquired one of his first major abstract paintings, Deep Shadows<\/a> (1954), which used these string-and-mesh techniques.<\/p>\n Increasingly drawing on his engineering background, Malina began integrating mechanical systems and lighting assemblies into his art, producing pioneering works that spanned the fields of light art<\/a> and kinetic art<\/a>. Not unlike his early rocketry work, Malina\u2019s art was rejected by traditionalists but celebrated by the European avant-garde for integrating cutting-edge science in art, and opening up radical new artistic possibilities.<\/p>\n Frank Malina oversees his Cosmos installation in the Pergamon Press lobby in Oxford, 1968.<\/p>\n In 1965, Malina\u2019s kinetic installation for the Pergamon Press building in Oxford, Cosmos<\/a>, cemented his reputation as an artist. This labyrinth of fluorescent lights and painted plexiglass rotor wheels integrated his expertise as both rocket scientist and artist. It was restored and installed at Oxford Brookes University in 2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n Malina applied the same sytematic rigour to all his engineering and artistic experiments. This unusual combination saw him launch Leonardo<\/a> in 1968 \u2013 an academic journal that enables artists to explain their work and methods in a manner similar to scientists. It has subsequently expanded into a torch-bearing organisation<\/a> that publishes books, runs talks and provides support for an international network of researchers and artists.<\/p>\n The extraordinary career of Malina \u2013 who died in Paris in 1981 \u2013 blazed a trail for generations of interdisciplinary researchers who have followed in his wake. Yet both his scientific and artistic achievements were suppressed because he was labelled a communist traitor in the US.<\/p>\n For many years, Malina\u2019s significant contributions to rocketry \u2013 critical in putting a man on the Moon \u2013 were erased from official histories. The damage to his reputation also made it difficult for US institutions to publicly embrace his artwork.<\/p>\n Malina said he felt betrayed<\/a> by a system that had raised up a former Nazi engineer like Wernher von Braun<\/a> to the status of hero, while erasing the contributions of scientists such as himself for their links to communism. Thankfully, Malina\u2019s vision of interdisciplinary collaboration has outlived the harshest critiques of his detractors \u2013 a testament to the originality and ingenuity of his work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Frank Malina was a lot of things. The Texas-born aeronautical engineer co-designed the first jet-assisted take-off (Jato) rocket…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269048,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-269047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Frank](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/file-20260128-56-f0jcp3.jpg\")
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\n Nasa Image Collection\/Alamy<\/a><\/p>\n