G.M. of the Rockets

For 140 seconds, the giant rocket engines quaked and thundered on the stands some 15 miles northeast of Sacramento, Calif., spewing smoke, steam and mud over the revetments. Suddenly the test director shut off the liquid fuel that had produced an awesome 300,000 lbs. of total thrust from the two biggest rocket engines ever developed in the U.S., the main unit for the 5,500-mile Titan ICBM. "O.K.," said the director to a visitor, in the silence that followed. "Now you can go over and see the solid-propellant guys."

Orbits & Torpedoes. At Aerojet-General Corp. last week, the Air Force's huge Titan was only one of a score of missiles whose power comes from the nation's biggest rocketmaker. Aerojet's "solid-propellant guys" were hard at work on the Navy's 1,500-mile Lockheed Polaris as well as a flock of deadly birds named Hawk, Sparrow, Bullpup, Genie. Last week Aerojet blasted off on two new projects involving several exciting new technologies:

P: Project Dyna-Soar, to shoot a manned rocket-powered aircraft into orbit around the earth and return. Martin and Boeing were named by the Defense Department to head two teams of companies that will present competing proposals for the Dyna-Soar contract. Aerojet was picked to help develop the power plant and the test facilities for the Boeing team.

P: A rocket-powered antisubmarine torpedo that will home on its target electronically. Aerojet is responsible for developing the entire system, including guidance.

P: In addition, a lightweight atomic reactor built by Aerojet went on display at Rome's International Congress on Electronics and Atomic Energy; another went into operation in Sicily, while still another is operating at the International Science Center at the Brussels Fair.

Profits & JATO. Aerojet's high-thrust activity has turned it from a mere nickel salute 16 years ago into the General Motors of U.S. rocketry. On 1957 sales of $161.9 million, it netted $3,800,000. This year's projection: sales of $180 million, with a net of $4,320,000.

Aerojet was founded by Dr. Theodore von K`arm`an, onetime boss of Caltech's famed Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, who currently splits his time as Aerojet chief consultant and chairman of NATO's aeronautical advisory council. Just before World War II, the Air Force asked him to work out a way to help overloaded bombers take off from short runways. Von K`arm`an's solution was the famed JATO rocket-booster unit. The only trouble was that the company lacked the capital and the production know-how to follow through on its big military contracts. For those it turned to Akron's General Tire & Rubber Co., which poured $4,000,000 into the tiny, brainy company (in return for 50% stock ownership) and installed Dan Kimball, then serving as General Tire's director of Government operations, as boss in 1945. In short order Aerojet was making good on its contracts, at one point hit production of 25,000 JATO units monthly. By V-J day it had 1,700 people on its payroll.

Space & Atoms. What saved the company in the postwar planemaker's famine was the same thing that made it grow in the first place: new ideas, plus topflight research into new fields. Gradually extending its contract to 87% ownership, General Tire gave Kimball the funds he needed to push Aerojet into liquid engines for some of the first U.S. military rockets: Douglas' early Nike, the Lark and Loon for the Navy. Aerojet branched out to work on underwater rocket engines, set up separate departments to pursue both liquid-and solid-fuel engines.

With Korea, the company zoomed. At its Sacramento plant, everything doubled; the cafeteria seating 450 workers was doubled soon after the original building was occupied; so was the solid-fuel engineering building. Entire new divisions were formed, and flourished. Example: Aerojet's Architect-Engineering Division, formed in 1947 to serve specialized needs, was called upon to serve as structural engineer for the rocket test station at Edwards Air Force Base on a $2,000,000 contract. It went on to a similar job at the Navy's missile test station at Point Mugu, Calif., the Army's Redstone Arsenal, Martin Co.'s Denver plant.

Today, though rockets for the Titan and Polaris missiles still account for the bulk of Aerojet's business, the company is moving fast across the whole spectrum. It formed an Astronautics Laboratory in 1956 to pursue abstract proposals for space flight, acquired two small companies to get ideas and lab space. An ordnance engineering division was set up to explore automation. A third new division, Aerojet-General Nucleonics, is about the most successful of all. Founded two years ago to study the application of nuclear energy to rocket propulsion, it soon went far beyond. The division, says President Kimball, has sold more nuclear reactors for commercial and research use than any other U.S. firm, will soon have 15 around the U.S. at $95,000 per copy.

President Kimball and his executives make no bones about the fact that all this research comes high. In its 16 years Aerojet has paid only one common-stock dividend. All the rest of the profits go for research in a ratio that holds company expenditures to 30% for production and 70% for research each year. Eventually, probably by 1960 when Titan and Polaris are in production, Aerojet will pay its stockholders regular dividends. But never so much that it cannot lay a big bet on any exciting new field that opens up.

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