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ReseaRch a n d developmenT In T h e na v y 45
The separation of R&D from production—clearly delineated in the MK56,
MK57, and SUBROC programs—mirrored a similar institutional division of
labor between research and development, and testing. Separate departments for
research, engineering, and testing had been established at the Naval Ordnance
Laboratory before the new campus at White Oak opened in 1950. Sections
in the research department, which “look[ed] into fundamental principles that
might be applied,” were generally grouped by scientific discipline: electricity and
magnetism, acoustics, mechanics, explosive phenomena, and physical optics. The
engineering department, by contrast, was responsible for hardware development.
Sections in this department were, by and large, identified by specific ordnance
items: ammunition, mines and depth charges, torpedoes, fuses, and plastics. The
test department evaluated the electrical and mechanical performance of ordnance
prototypes in controlled test facilities and in the field. 22 While the laboratory
divisions periodically created, abolished, and shifted between departments and
new programs, this organizational division of labor remained essentially intact
at White Oak well into the 1970s. 23 Functional separation did not preclude
collaboration among the laboratory’s staff of scientists and engineers. Nor did
it prevent cross-fertilization between the laboratory and industrial contractors.
The Naval Ordnance Laboratory, Business Week reported in 1948, “helps
[contractors] set up the jobs and get the ‘bugs’ out of the mass-production line
[and it] sends out researchers and engineers to lend a helping hand.” 24
Unlike the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, which had been born and reared
within the Navy establishment, the Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake
descended directly from of the wartime rocket development program, which the
Army Air Corps (Army Air Forces after 1941) established under contract at
the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in nearby Pasadena. Prior to
1940, rocket technology had received scant attention from the military services.
Most rocket R&D was centered in civilian institutions. During the war, however,
physicist Charles Lauritsen, a respected expert in high-voltage nuclear physics,
and his research group at Caltech laid much of the groundwork for the Navy’s
wartime rocket program at China Lake. 25
22 “Naval Ordnance Laboratory, White Oak, Maryland,” 237–38; R. B. Dittmar, “Development of
Physical Facilities for Research,” Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 37 (April 1949): 425–26;
“Ordnance Test Facilities Greatly Expanded at NOL,” Product Engineering 21 (April 1950): 152; D. S.
Muzzey, “How the Project Manager System Works at the Naval Ordnance Lab,” Armed Forces Management
4 (August 1958): 29.
23 In 1975, the Secretary of Defense directed the Navy and the Air Force to turn over to the Army all
in-house procurement, production, and distribution of ammunition and related ordnance. Transfer of the
Navy’s production facilities was completed in 1978. Shiman, Forging the Sword, 81. The Naval Ordnance
Laboratory permanently closed in 1997.
24 “Navy Research Helps Industrial Progress,” 48, 50 (quote).
25 Caltech’s rocket program was split between Lauritsen’s group, which coordinated testing and
evaluation activities at China Lake, and the group headed by aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán. At
the end of the war, the rocket work under von Kármán’s direction shifted to the newly established Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, operated by Caltech under contract for the Army. J. D. Gerrard-Gough and Albert
B. Christman, The Grand Experiment at Inyokern, vol. 2 of History of the Naval Weapons Center, China Lake,
California (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Navy, Naval Historical Division, 1978), 280; Clayton R.
Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program: A History of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1982), chaps. 1–2.