Reaction Motors

Reaction Motors, Inc. (RMI) was an early American maker of liquid-fueled rocket engines, located in New Jersey. RMI engines with 6,000 lbf (27 kN) thrust powered the Bell X-1 rocket aircraft that first broke the sound barrier in 1947, and later successors including the X-1A, X1E, and the D558-2 Douglas Skyrocket. A 20,000 lbf (89 kN) thrust RMI engine also powered the Viking research rocket, the first large liquid-fueled US high-altitude rocket. RMI was merged with Thiokol in 1958, where it produced the XLR-99 engine that powered the X-15 rocket aircraft.

Reaction Motors, Inc. began operation as early as 1930 through the work of then American Interplanetary Society members Lovell Lawrence, George Edward Pendray, Hugh Pierce, and engineer John Shesta. This group quickly moved from science fiction discussions to practical rocketry.

Pendray contributed heavily to their early designs using knowledge acquired from a trip to Berlin in 1931. In 1938, Princeton University student James Hart Wyld tested a two-pound rocket which provided 90 pounds of thrust; this would become the basis for the group's work over the next two decades.

Though test flights are recorded from 1933 forward, the group would rename themselves the American Rocket Society and continue experimentation in the relatively populous area of Staten Island until incorporating Reaction Motors, Inc. under Lovell Lawrence in 1938 in pursuit of a war-time contract from the United States Navy.

In 1938 and prior to incorporation, the group successfully designed and perfected the world's first regenerative cooling rocket, technology which would for the first time make liquid-fueled rockets capable of burning for long enough periods to be practical. All future liquid-fueled rockets would build off this technology. They tested this rocket in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, not far from the laboratory they built it in.

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