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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.
46 so u R c e s o f we a p o n sy s T e m s In n o v a T Io n In T h e depaR TmenT o f defense Lauritsen also played a major role in site selection and facilities planning at China Lake. This sprawling installation, which covered more than one thousand square miles by the mid-1950s, was conceived in 1943 to test and evaluate the aircraft rockets, propellants, and launchers produced by his staff back in Pasadena. Two years later, as rocket work rapidly shifted from development to mass production, Lauritsen and his military counterparts prepared to transfer the China Lake test facility from Caltech to the Navy and expand its mission to include a broad program of research and development. 26 During the postwar period, the station operated as a full-service weapons development installation, turning out home-grown rockets, guided missiles, torpedoes, and aircraft firecontrol systems. 27 A diverse R&D infrastructure with specialized expertise in many scientific and engineering disciplines—physics, chemistry, mathematics and computing, metallurgy, ceramics, electronics, optics, aerodynamics, ballistics, and chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineering—supported these and other weapons programs. Taken together, this broad range of multidisciplinary activities made the Naval Ordnance Test Station the largest in-house R&D installation operated by the Navy after World War II. Its rapid growth also signaled the emergence of rockets and guided missiles as permanent additions to the Navy’s postwar arsenal. 28 The centerpiece of the research and development effort at the Naval Ordnance Test Station was the Michelson Laboratory, a vast, six-wing building completed in 1948 at a cost of nearly $10 million. 29 This state-of-the-art facility consolidated the station’s previously scattered R&D functions, and it also occupied a central role in rocket and missile development. 30 Physically, it incorporated the latest features of modern laboratory design and function. While the laboratory was still on the drawing board, senior staff in the Bureau of Ordnance consulted leading industrial firms for advice and guidance during the planning stages. Ordnance officials visited both the venerable Bell Telephone Laboratories, which had recently moved from their original location in New York City to a state-of-the-art facility in Murray Hill, New Jersey, as well as the new research campus that electronics giant Radio Corporation of America had built in nearby Princeton. The tour also included such well-known private research institutions as the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research and the laboratories of the Gulf 26 “China Lake: Navy in the Desert Is Guided Missile Laboratory,” All Hands, no. 469 (March 1956): 60–61; Christman, Sailors, Scientists, and Rockets, 243; Gerrard-Gough and Christman, The Grand Experiment at Inyokern, 2–3. 27 Like the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, the Naval Ordnance Test Station did not operate manufacturing facilities beyond the pilot production stage. After the war, industrial contractors, such as Philco and the General Tire and Rubber Company mass produced the missiles and rockets developed at China Lake. 28 The transition from conventional ordnance to missiles and rockets was already underway during the war. In 1944, for example, the Army spent more than $150 million on rocket procurement. The Navy’s expenditures were much higher, reaching $100 million per month in 1945. Gerrard-Gough and Christman, The Grand Experiment at Inyokern, 194. 29 The laboratory was named after physicist Albert A. Michelson, a Naval Academy graduate and the first American to win the Nobel Prize for physics (1907). 30 When it opened, the laboratory had consumed approximately 10 percent of the $100 million investment in new facilities and staff made by the Bureau of Ordnance at China Lake. F. G. Sawyer, “Rocket Chemistry at Inyokern,” Chemical and Engineering News 27 (18 July 1949): 2067.
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In d e x AAF. See Army Air Forces.
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