Rocket Man

Jack Parsons was the father of modern rocket science and co-founder of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was also an occultist who practised dark magic with L. Ron Hubbard and Aleister Crowley.

When Marvel “Jack” Parsons began launching homemade rockets from his backyard as a child, people regarded him with suspicion. Not simply because the sight of a teenager firing explosives into the air (and occasionally his neighbours’ yards) tends to raise eyebrows, but because during the 1920s the very idea of rocket science was regarded as a crackpot fantasy.

In the first half of the 20th century, engineers interested in flight were encouraged to experiment with planes and airships. According to the conventional wisdom of the time, a rocket was no more capable of travelling through space than it was through time. As a popular textbook on astronomy put it, “only those who are unfamiliar with the physical factors involved believe that such adventures will ever pass beyond the realms of fancy”.

Ironically, those very realms of fancy were the things that first attracted the young Parsons to rocketry. Stories about rocket-led space travel featured regularly in the pulp magazines he read with his classmates, and inspired the young student to build simple gunpowder rockets with odds and ends after school. Before long Parsons’ backyard was a crater field, each patch of scorched grass a testament to his passion.

After tinkering with his makeshift designs for a few years, the budding rocketeer and a friend named Edward Forman decided to take their hobby to the next level. Though neither held any qualifications above high school science, the pair began attending lectures at the neighbouring California Institute of Technology, where their enthusiasm for setting fire to a bunch of explosives in the name of science piqued the interest of an open-minded grad student named Frank Malina.

Together, the three young men formed the world’s first university-led rocket research centre, dubbed the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, or GALCIT. Their colleagues had another name for it: the Suicide Squad. Almost immediately the group ran into trouble when a misfired rocket forced them to move out of their laboratory and onto a concrete platform away from the university. After a second explosion lodged a piece of steel into a wall, they were moved off campus for good.

The Suicide Squad was relocated to the desert on the western edge of Pasadena, where the only people they were likely to injure were themselves. The desert was undoubtedly the safest arena for his experiments, but Parsons couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being ostracised from the scientific fold. Despite Caltech’s apparent support for his project, Parsons knew most of the faculty still looked on rocketry as a glorified (and highly dangerous) superstition.

It didn’t help that Parsons had also developed an interest in actual magic, and began attending meetings at the Los Angeles branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), a spiritualist organisation run by infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley. The OTO preached a philosophy of religious libertarianism (its credo: “Do What Thou Wilt”), where free love intermingled with the ritual practice of Black Magick. Members wore black robes and practised mass at a dark altar, drawing mystical symbols in the air with swords, lighting ‘sacred’ fires and even, on occasion, drinking menstrual blood.

Parsons was drawn to the idea that enlightenment could be achieved through sex and the worship of ancient Egyptian deities such as Horus; he began applying the practice to both his spiritual and scientific pursuits, which he apparently regarded as two sides of the same coin. At his laboratory, Parsons chanted pagan hymns as he lit his rockets, a habit his fellow Suicide Squad members shrugged off as a “loveable screwball” up to his old tricks.

Parsons believed he could incorporate magic into his rocket science. At the same time, he tried to bring a little scientific rigour to the realm of the occult, experimenting with different chants and rituals, and gathering evidence to see if they worked. It didn’t take long until he had his first ‘proof ’: soon after he joined the OTO, Parsons’ standing in the scientific community suddenly took an unexpected turn for the better.

“Parsons and Crowley attempted to physically manifest a deity called a Moonchild through chanting, dripping animal blood and masturbation. When a scarlet-haired woman turned up after the ceremony, Parsons declared the experiment a success.”

With World War II looming, the U.S. Army finally began funding research into rockets. Army engineers had been performing experiments for a few years, but couldn’t work out how to launch them with consistency or precision, as the rocket fuel tended to shift when the canisters moved around. As luck (or Horus) would have it, Parsons had already stumbled on a solution to this problem: as a teenager, he experimented with adding glue to his gunpowder as a binding agent, and found his rockets went off like clockwork.

The army loved Parsons’ “solid fuel” innovation, and invested a small sum of money. With this, the Suicide Squad founded the Aerojet Engineering Corporation in 1941 and began making rockets for the military. Formerly sceptical scientists from around the world suddenly saw rocketry as the future, and lined up to work with Parsons. Two years later, with demand for his rockets soaring, he co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (nicknamed the “Jack Parsons Laboratory”) to research space travel full-time.

While his work promised to help humanity explore the boundaries of the physical universe, Parsons became ever more obsessed with exploring the metaphysical one. “If I had the genius to found the jet propulsion field in the U.S.,” he wrote to an OTO member, “I should also be able to apply this genius to the magical field.” Parsons began corresponding with Crowley, who admired the young convert’s intelligence. In no time, Parsons became leader of the OTO’s West Coast branch, and with money from his rocket business purchased a huge wooden house dubbed the “Parsonage”, which he declared the church’s new headquarters.

But as his star rose in the OTO, it began to fade at work. Rumours about his private life circulated around Caltech, with stories about naked dancing and drug use. Meanwhile, Parsons started showing up to work increasingly late and unkempt, and his behaviour became more erratic, even by his own standards: to kill time, he and Forman held duels on the lab’s test sites, aiming at each others’ feet in games of chicken. Later, when a former adversary asked Parsons to use a type of rocket fuel he didn’t like, Parsons blew up half the storehouse.

Eventually this hedonism drew the ire of the FBI, which put pressure on the organisations he helped found to edge him out. In 1943, Parsons took a modest payout from the Aerojet Engineering Corporation and retired, aged just 30 years old. He was sad, but looked on the bright side: at least now he could work on his magic full-time.

By this point the Parsonage had become a revolving door of eccentrics, and was frequented by everyone from nuclear physicists to witches and science fiction writers, including a little-known fantasy author named L. Ron Hubbard. While other OTO members found the writer a bit odd even for them, Parsons was smitten. “I deduce that he is in direct touch with some higher entity,” he wrote to Crowley after they met. The two became inseparable, and Parsons asked Hubbard to move into his mansion. There the pair worked around the clock on a new ritual of Parsons’ own creation, attempting to physically manifest a deity called a Moonchild through chanting, dripping animal blood and masturbation. When a scarlet-haired woman turned up at the Parsonage shortly after the ceremony, Parsons declared the experiment a success.

However, when Crowley found out about Hubbard, he was enraged. The ageing occultist saw Hubbard as a trickster and a charlatan, and warned his “weak fool” of a pupil to cast the future Scientologist out. But by this point Parsons was well and truly under Hubbard’s spell. This relationship would become the retired rocketeer’s second downfall: facing bankruptcy, Parsons entrusted Hubbard with his last $20,000 to invest in a moneymaking scheme buying and selling boats. Instead, Hubbard ran off with the money – and Parsons’ wife

Penniless and depressed, the one-time rocket scientist resorted to part-time jobs fixing washing machines, before eventually landing a gig designing pyrotechnics for schlocky Hollywood movies. It may not have been glamorous, but at least he was back working with the explosives that had first sparked his fascination all those years ago.

Sadly, in 1952, a massive explosion tore through Parsons’ home while he was mixing chemicals in his workshop. He died several hours later, aged 37, surrounded by mathematical formulas and pentagrams. Police ruled his death an accident, though rumours quickly surfaced that he had been the target of an assassination. No evidence for this was ever found.

The rockets Parsons developed in his youth would go on to form the basis of the Space Shuttle program that launched humanity into the stars. Sadly, Parsons never lived to see his creations leave the Earth he so wished to transcend. In the years following his death, Caltech and NASA began wiping his name from their records. But history hasn’t entirely forgotten him. As the ’50s gave way to the free-loving ’60s, the science community began to view Parsons more kindly, as a brilliant eccentric rather than a mere embarrassment; the “true father of the American space race”, as he is now known.

In 1972, a crater on the Moon was named after him, an entirely apt tribute to the man who made space travel possible. Don’t try looking for it, though. It’s on the dark side. Just like its namesake.

Published in Smith Journal vol. 23 with the original title ‘Great Man of History’