BY CAMERON McWHIRTER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
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James C. Irwin, president and CEO of CTL Aerospace, Inc. of West Chester holds a piece of the 91-LD heat shield material the company manufactured for the Mercury capsules.
(Yoni Pozner photo)
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Elmer Warnken spent the morning of Feb. 20, 1962, lounging around a hotel swimming pool in Phoenix. He was escaping a bitter Cincinnati winter on a well-deserved vacation.
President of Cincinnati Testing Laboratories (CTL), Mr. Warnken, then 43, had spent years working on a crucial component for NASA's Mercury space capsule: a heat shield designed to keep the capsule and an astronaut from burning to a cinder as the ship plunged back to earth.
In previous months, he had gone to Cape Canaveral to see test launches, and several aborted manned flights. But on Feb. 20 he learned -- too late to do anything about it -- that the launch of Mercury Friendship 7 with Lt. Col. John Glenn was a "go." All he could do was sit by the pool with his wife and enjoy his vacation.
Until a bellboy brought him a telephone.
"It was Houston, Canaveral and Huntsville (Ala.) on a conference call," said Mr. Warnken, speaking 36 years later in the living room of his Daleville home. "They said, 'We think the shield has disengaged. What do you think?' "
While they spoke, Lt. Col. Glenn was hurtling through space more than 100 miles above, the first American in orbit, wondering if he was going to burn to a crisp. A small red light on his instrument panel was indicating the shield wasn't in place. If it fell away, the capsule and Lt. Col. Glenn could be exposed to temperatures of more than 15,000 degrees.
NASA officials grilled Mr. Warnken, who stood in his bathing suit staring up at an empty blue sky.
The group decided to leave the retrorocket pack in place instead of jettisoning it before re-entry as planned. The pack was hooked over the ends of the heat shield and should hold it on. But the anxious bureaucrats wondered to Mr. Warnken: Would it work?
Mr. Warnken adopted a fatalism common among pioneers of space flight.
"Well, I said, 'There's only one way to find out,' " he laughed. "It did."
Sen. Glenn, in written comments about the heat shield problem on his Senate web site, described the situation.
"During re-entry, large portions of burning retrorocket pack came flying by the window," he wrote. "I kept working, controlling the attitude of the spacecraft, trying to determine whether it was the rocket pack or the heat shield breaking up. Fortunately, it was the rocket pack -- or I wouldn't be answering these questions today."
As the capsule plunged into the South Atlantic Ocean, it became clear the shield had worked perfectly. Mr. Warnken's small Cincinnati company had become part of space history.
91-LD
John Glenn's self-described "fireball ride" back to Earth became a zenith moment for CTL and perhaps its most famous invention, a high temperature plastic patented as "91-LD."
CTL was created in 1946 by Mr. Warnken and Melvin Korelitz, vice president, then two 20-something ex-Formica employees. Mr. Warnken, a lifelong west-sider who had taken engineering courses at the University of Cincinnati, was convinced that strong plastic compounds, called "phenolic resins," had great potential for use in cars, engines, weapons and space flight.
"A lot of people needed it and nobody knew anything about it," he said.
The small company started research and development on Fourth Street. Initially, things didn't go that well.
"We were really close to going broke," Mr. Warnken said.
After a lot of knocking on doors and hard work back at the lab, Mr. Warnken and Mr. Korelitz landed contracts to produce missile cones for the military at its rocket testing site in Huntsville, Ala.
The first missiles launched out of the atmosphere in Huntsville all had the problem of exploding during re-entry. The heat burned up the metal. CTL solved that problem with 91-LD.
Unlike any other material offered by large companies, CTL's 91-LD worked. The rockets didn't explode.
The concept was that 91-LD, a lightweight pumice-like substance, would slowly evaporate in high temperatures, a process called "ablation," creating a protective gas that would throw off a lot of heat and protect any ship coming back into the Earth's atmosphere. Mr. Warnken described the chemical process as "similar to throwing a snowball in a furnace." The snowballs melts, then becomes water, then becomes steam, consuming a lot of heat energy in the process.
Mr. Warnken said the product, which revolutionized the hard plastics field, was created by his and other CTL employees' spending a lot of hours in a lab mixing materials and then burning them. The tedious process resembled the work of master chefs working out a new recipe.
"We really didn't have, like they say today, a corporate mission," said Mr. Warnken. "We drifted along and if we saw a problem we tackled it. . . . We didn't have any scientists. Nobody knew anything about this field at all."
The company set up a huge "arc plasma generator" in the West End using electric generators, built for the city's old trolley system, to create the intense heat needed to test their products.
"We made an awful lot of noise but nobody complained. Nobody lived around there then," Mr. Warnken said. "When that generator went off, the thing screamed like a banshee."
Jim Irwin Sr., who was a young salesman for CTL in 1961 and today owns the company, said 91-LD was "the granddaddy of phenolic resins," a generation of hard plastics that today form components of all kinds of machinery and engines.
CTL, Glenn and space
At the time, CTL officials were forbidden by the government from discussing its shield or anything about the space program. But today, Mr. Warnken -- now retired -- and Mr. Irwin gladly talk about CTL's pivotal role in America's early attempts at space exploration.
Mr. Warnken has stories of regular meetings with Wernher von Braun, the famous German rocket scientist who masterminded the American space program. It was an age when young, eager business people -- many of whom like Mr. Warnken and Mr. Irwin held no advanced scientific degrees -- worked to do something that had never been done: putting an American in orbit.
"We had a lot of Ph.D.'s in the process, but their minds were contained by what they couldn't do," Mr. Warnken said. "In that day, you had to do it. You didn't think about what you couldn't do. You just did what you had to do."
Mr. Irwin laughed when asked about his training.
"Well, I wasn't a rocket scientist," he said.
CTL's successes with the Mercury program and Lt. Col. Glenn's flight landed the company work on the next program, Gemini, and then the Apollo ships that went to the moon.
Today an independent company owned by Mr. Irwin, CTL Aerospace Inc., now located in West Chester, has grown from a $1 million business with 35 employees and no computers in the early 1960s to a $35 million, 300 employee, fully computerized business. CTL has few government contracts, but does a lot of subcontract business producing parts of commercial aircraft engines and commercial satellite rockets. 91-LD, long since retired, today occupies the portion of a shelf in a display cabinet at the company offices.
And John Glenn?
The CTL contact has been minimal. Mr. Irwin -- who had "high-fived" co-workers when Mr. Glenn landed safely in 1962 -- still bristles about writing the senator in the 1980s. The company had lost a government bid because it accidentally hadn't filled out a section of a form.
"We wrote saying, 'We built your heat shield and now we have a problem,' " said Mr. Irwin, 66. "Some lowly assistant sent back a letter saying they couldn't do anything. Well, I thought that sure meant a lot. I thought, to hell with him."
Mr. Warnken, now 80, has much warmer memories of Mr. Glenn, including meeting him in the White House Rose Garden in the 1960s.
He said he has been "appalled by the lack of public interest" in the space program in recent years, and hopes Sen. Glenn's return to space will spark a renewed effort by this country to tackle "the last frontier" once again.
As for his own involvement in the initial "very primitive effort" in space, Mr. Warnken said he is proud that those early capsules (including CTL heat shields) now hang in the Smithsonian Institution. That pioneering effort, he said, is something of which all Americans can be proud.
"People said, 'Oh, my God, that can't work,' " he said smiling. "And it did."
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