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GALCIT, a collection of aeronautically related laboratories at Caltech, began as a graduate school for aeronautics in 1926, with funding from Daniel Guggenheim. In the 30's and 40's, graduate students shared the facilities with southern California aircraft companies such as Douglas, Northrop, Lockheed and Boeing, who used Caltech's wind tunnels to design or test virtually all of the military aircraft used in World War II. At the same time, GALCIT scientists were building rockets and launching them in the nearby Arroyo Seco, the future site of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Some current areas of reseach at GALCIT are: physics of fluids, computational fluid dynamics, technical fluid mehanics, structural mechanics, and mechanics of fracture. Caltech is also the recipient of a DOE ASCI supercomputing grant for "simulating dynamic response of materials."