Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Aerojet
Summary
Aerojet was an American rocket and missile propulsion manufacturer based primarily in Rancho Cordova, California, with divisions in Redmond, Washington, Orange and Gainesville in Virginia, and Camden, Arkansas. Aerojet was owned by GenCorp. In 2013, Aerojet was merged by GenCorp with the former Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne to form Aerojet Rocketdyne.
Aerojet developed from a 1936 meeting hosted by Theodore von Kármán at his home. Joining von Kármán, who was at the time director of Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, were a number of Caltech professors and students, including rocket scientist and astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky and explosives expert Jack Parsons, all of whom were interested in the topic of spaceflight. The group continued to occasionally meet, but its activities were limited to discussions rather than experimentation.
Their first design was tested on August 16, 1941, consisting of a small cylindrical solid-fuel motor attached to the bottom of a plane. Takeoff distance was shortened by half, and the USAAF placed an order for experimental production versions.
Some aspects of the early operation of the company were described by Kármán in his autobiography:
On March 19, 1942, Haley obtained our incorporation papers and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation was launched. I was President; Malina was Treasurer; and Haley was Secretary. We had three vice-presidents: Parsons, Summerfield, and Forman. We issued stock to ourselves, and for a brief time Haley seemed to own the entire corporation because, being the only man in the group with cash, he actually put up all the initial capital. We opened offices on East Colorado Street in Pasadena ... we moved to ... 285 West Colorado Street...Thus began ... the world’s largest manufacturer of rockets and propellants. In only twenty years it was to grow from six people with a capitalization of $1200 into a 700-million-dollar a year business, a staff of nearly 34,000, and a key role in the modern defense picture of the United States.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.