in 1940 Apprehensive about developments in Europe regarding
Nazism, in 1930 Kármán accepted the directorship of the
Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the
California Institute of Technology (GALCIT). The directorship included provision for a
research assistant, and he selected
Frank Wattendorf, an American who had been studying for three years in Aachen. Another student
Ernest Edwin Sechler took up the problem of making reliable
airframes for aircraft, and with Kármán's support, developed an understanding of
aeroelasticity. The US Army Air Force wanted Caltech to manufacture JATO rockets, but Caltech was not interested in operating in industry. In 1936, Kármán engaged the legal services of
Andrew G. Haley to form the
Aerojet Corporation, with his graduate student
Frank Malina and their experimental rocketry collaborators
Jack Parsons and
Edward Forman to manufacture
JATO rocket motors. Kármán later became a
naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1940, Kármán was selected by
John M. Carmody, Administrator of the Federal Works Agency to be on the Board of Engineers tasked with investigating the November 7, 1940, collapse of the
Tacoma Narrows Bridge outside
Tacoma, Washington. His expertise was instrumental in discovering the effect of aerodynamic forces on the bridge, causing its unusual "galloping" behavior and eventual collapse. Along with Civil Engineers
Othmar Amman and
Glenn B. Woodruff, he published the report "The Failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge" on March 28, 1941. German activity during
World War II increased US military interest in rocket research. In early 1943, the Experimental Engineering Division of the
United States Army Air Forces Material Command forwarded to Kármán reports from British intelligence sources describing German rockets capable of travelling more than 100 miles (160 km). In a letter dated August 2, 1943, Kármán provided the Army with his analysis of and comments on the German program. In 1944 he and others affiliated with GALCIT founded the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is now a
federally funded research and development center managed and operated by Caltech under a contract from
NASA. In 1946 he became the first chairman of the
Scientific Advisory Group which studied aeronautical technologies for the United States Army Air Forces. He also helped found
AGARD, the
NATO aerodynamics research oversight group (1951), the
International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (1956), the
International Academy of Astronautics (1960), and the
Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in
Sint-Genesius-Rode, south of
Brussels (1956). He eventually became an important figure in supersonic motion, noting in a seminal paper that aeronautical engineers were "pounding hard on the closed door leading into the field of supersonic motion." == Last years ==