After college, he married his high school sweetheart, Marjorie Martin(December 12, 1918-March 20, 2023) and took broadcasting jobs in Anderson, Chicago, and Indianapolis.

Later he served as the aerology officer aboard the USS Saratoga while it was flying missions against Tokyo and Iwo Jima in the Pacific Ocean theater of World War II, from 1944 to 1945.

Ross received a campaign star in his Pacific Theater Ribbon for the first carrier plane strike at Tokyo in February 1945 and for the Iwo Jima invasion.

He returned to civilian life and opened an advertising agency in Pasadena, California, where his wife, Marjorie, had moved during World War II.

The business continued successfully until June 1950, when Ross was recalled to active duty for the Korean War as a lieutenant in the United States Naval Reserve.

Initially, Malcolm Ross was stationed as an instructor in radiological defense for the Naval Damage Control Training Center at Treasure Island, in San Francisco.

Ross was technical director for Project Churchy,[c][11][d] an expedition to the Galápagos Islands to obtain cosmic ray and meteorological data from balloon flights.

As a physicist in the Air Branch of the ONR, Ross specialized in the physics of the upper atmosphere and participated in Strato-Lab flights both as a civilian and as a naval officer.

In 1958, jointly with Lieutenant Commander Morton Lee Lewis, he received the Harmon International Trophy (Aeronaut) for the November 8, 1956, record-breaking flight.

The purpose of the flight was to gather meteorological, cosmic ray, and other scientific data necessary to improve safety at high altitudes.

The flight was cancelled after LCDR M. Lee Lewis was killed during preflight experiments by a falling pulley-block when a knot in the nylon rope suspending the gondola came loose.

[34] John Hall[e] halted stratospheric balloon flights carrying astronomers from the Equatorial Division of the Naval Observatory, saying to Arthur Hoag, "That was so much monkeyshine.

Ross and Lewis remained in the stratosphere near that altitude throughout the day, although by 10:00 PM they descended to 68,500 feet (20,900 m) while dropping 350 pounds (160 kg) of batteries.

Later in the morning, Lewis removed the camera from the rack and pointed it at Ross while he was discussing (with a member of the support team flying below in a Navy R5D) repairs that they made using masking tape to fix a pressure leak on one of the two escape hatches.

Malcolm Ross described it as "...probably one of the strangest programs that a television audience had ever seen...."[38] The flight lasted 9 hours 54 minutes and covered a horizontal distance of 140 miles (230 km).

[54] For this record ascent, President John F. Kennedy presented the balloonists (Victor Prather, posthumously to his wife) the 1961 Harmon Trophy for Aeronauts.