Jack Parsons: Celebrating the Rocket-Powered Prophet of the Apocalypse
And ‘yes’ you can’t trust L. Ron Hubbard.
A few days ago (on the 17th June) we saw the 70th anniversary of the mysterious death of American space exploration pioneer and occultist Jack Parsons. Who Jack?
John Marvel Whiteside Parsons (1914–1952) universally known as Jack, was an American chemist, rocket engineer, and follower of the Thelema religious movement devised by Aleister Crowley.
Parsons was one of the principal founders of both Aerojet Engineering, later a major NASA contractor, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, now part of NASA, and in the 1930s and 1940s he pioneered the development of both liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets. His work at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) was so dangerous and involved so many explosions that Parsons and his colleagues were known as the ‘Suicide Squad’.
Scandals and the mysterious circumstances of his death would see Parsons written out of the history of rocketry but in later years his reputation was rehabilitated and he was described as one most important figures ‘in modern rocketry and the foundation of the American space program’. The crater Parsons on the dark side of the Moon was named after him in 1972.
