Astroturf

M. G. Lord, Walker&Co, PSU TL782.L67 2005

About interesting people at JPL.

Title page quotes:

• Never send a man to do a robot's job. -- Gentry Lee

• Don't marry and engineer, Dolores, marry an artist. They have more home life. -- Robert. A. Heinlein

• p2 Donna Shirley, director of Mars Exploration program
• MG ( 1955/11/18 ) daughter of Charles Caroll Lord and Mary Pfister.
• Charles (1905? - 1993? cancer?). was liason engineer at Convair (PBY, CV-240 and CV-340), living in La Jolla near Dr. Seuss. Later at Northrop ( HL-10 and M2-F2 lifting bodies ) and living in Long Beach. Later working for Northrop on "small mechanical gadgets" on Mariner 69. Retured 1971 at age 65, but some contract work after.
• Mary P. Lord was B.S. Chemistry 1938, quit to be housewife. Died of colon cancer in September 1970, p55. MG involuntarily did cooking and laundry after that.
• p55: UCB's George Pimentel was PI for the Mariner infrared spectrometers, mistakenly identified methane and ammonia, retracted.
• p62: first rocket test in canyon ar Devil's Gate Dam Halloween 1936 Frank Malina, John Parsons, 3 others
• p65: WAC Corporal - 80km altitude.

Malina developed JATO with von Kármán and helped found Aerojet to produce them. Malina was hounded out of the US as an accused communist, while von Braun and the Operation Paperclip Germans were welcomed as "not really Nazis" to head the US space program. Malina became an artist in Paris, and died in 1981.

Much of the book is about JPL's evolution out of sexism, and about MG's growing understanding of her father's aloofness and driving regrets.