Jack Parsons is one of the most important figures in the US space and rocketry systems. He was a real space cadet, too. This is quite lengthy, but also quite a story, and all true.
Parsons was born October 2, 1914, in Los Angeles, California. His actual name, and I’m not making this up, was Marvel Whiteside Parsons, but he went by Jack even as a boy. His parents divorced when he was a baby, and Jack didn’t have much contact with him growing up. What he did have was privilege; his mother’s family was quite wealthy and they lived on “Millionaire’s Mile” in Pasadena.
As a boy, Parsons had numerous servants but only one real friend; Edward Forman. They shared interests in reading science fiction stories and building homemade rockets powered by gunpowder — which in the 1920s was apparently readily available. At least if you were a rich kid. The boys survived their experiments with lives and fingers intact, and Parsons managed to construct a working solid-fuel rocket when he was in his teens. He went on to earn a number of patents, all in the area of solid-fuel propellants.
Parsons was not a good student, and dropped out of Pasadena Junior College after just one semester. He got a job at the Hercules Powder Company — the “powder” in the name was “gunpowder,” and he continued to build rockets, sometimes by pilfering materials from work. By then he had moved up from gunpowder to nitroglycerin, but evidently knew what he was doing and never even got a minor burn.
Parsons and Forman were still close friends, and befriended a PhD student at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Frank Malina. Malina was working on a thesis on rocketry, and the three jointly applied for a grant from Caltech. Their objective was to develop a rocket powerful enough to reach outer space, but they carefully refrained from mentioning that, because at the time such a thing was considered outlandish and unscientific. Malina’s PhD advisor gave them access to the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT), and they started calling themselves the GALCIT Rocket Research Group. Malina, who was the only one of the trio with any scientific training, kept their work rigorous, while Parsons and Forman “kept Malina focused toward building actual rocket engines, not just solving equations on paper.”
While they were working on the GALCIT Rocket Research Group, all three were interested in politics as well. Malina joined the American Communist Party and recommended it to Parsons as well, but Parsons never joined. This turned out to be to his advantage years later, when suspicions about communists got a bit out of hand in the US.
When he was 21, Parsons married Helen Northrup, and got a job at an explosives manufacturer. To his new wife’s dismay, Parsons spent most of his salary on the GALCIT Rocket Research Group. She may have been somewhat dismayed when she found him manufacturing nitroglycerin on their porch. He also caused some friction by constantly asking her family for loans. By that time it was the early 1930s and the Great Depression had arrived, and his mother’s family lost their fortune.
By 1937 the GALCIT Rocket Research Group actually managed to construct a working liquid-fueled rocket engine, and Parsons had apparently begun to build a reputation— he testified as an expert witness in a trial involving a car bomb. His local fame, though, also highlighted his lack of a formal education or degree. He tried to work on rectifying that by enrolling in the University of Southern California, but gave up after finding that his work on rocketry left him no time to attend classes.
in 1939, Parsons and his wife Helen attended a service at the Church of Thelema in Hollywood. Thelema is, or at least was, a religion founded by the extremely eccentric Aleister Crowley, who believed that magic spells worked. Or, well, he insisted on spelling it “magick;” possibly the “k” makes the difference. Parsons believed it all, and suggested that the “magick force” came from quantum physics (an area he knew hardly anything about). The Parsons joined the Church of Thelema in 1941 and became pretty active in it. Aleister Crowley believed (for a while) that Jack Parsons would be his successor, and would eventually head up the church.
Meanwhile, Frank Malina had sent a proposal to the National Academy of Sciences about developing a type of rocket engine that could enable airplanes to take off from shorter runways. The GALCIT Rocket Research Group received $11,000 to research the device, and became the first rocket research team funded by the US Government. They had to spend about 25% of their grant to repair the damage they caused to Caltech’s buildings, but their Jet Assisted Take Off (JATO) project showed enough promise that they received another $22,000.
In late 1941 the US entered World War II, and Parsons’ team began delivering working JATO units to the Army. They formed the Aerojet Engineering Corporation to build and sell the units, and by about 1942 Parsons had developed a solid rocket fuel that became the basis for solid fuel propellants for decades — including the boosters used by NASA’s Space Shuttle.
Around 1942 and 43, Parsons founded another organization, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which still exists as a major research facility. By then his organizations were receiving millions of dollars from government contracts, and Parsons had become a nationally-recognized figure. He had also gotten more deeply involved with Thelema, and started doing things like deciding Helen’s younger sister (who was only 17) was his “new wife.” This was apparently okay with Helen, who began a relationship with Wilfred Smith, who was the local leader of the Church of Thelema. Parsons himself began using cocaine, amphetamines, peyote, mescaline, and opiates in conjunction with the church’s rituals and practices. The FBI investigated the church, and its out-of-the-mainstream practices, and concluded that while it was bizarre, it didn’t pose a threat to national security.
In 1943, Parsons left Aerojet and the JPL and founded Ad Astra Engineering and the Vulcan Powder Company. He bought a mansion on Orange Grove Boulevardand opened it as a rooming house, but not for just anybody. Other Thelemites lived there, and Parsons placed ads that said “…only bohemians, artists, musicians, atheists, anarchists, or any other exotic types need to apply for rooms.” He also started reporting that the Thelemic rituals he conducted were resulting in paranormal events. Some of these, though, were likely to have been pranks by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, one of Parsons’ new friends.
One of the Thelemic rituals Parsons conducted in the mansion, which everyone called the Parsonage, was a highly complicated rite intended to bring the Thelemite goddess Babalon to Earth. He evidently believed it had worked. He decided that Marjorie Cameron, an unemployed illustrator who had moved into the Parsonage, was the living manifestation of Babalon. Cameron had no idea what was going on. Some of the other Thelemites agreed that Babalon had arrived, but noticed different effects. Kenneth Grant, a Thelemite living in England, thought that Parsons’ ritual had triggered UFO incidents, like the Roswell, New Mexico event, and a sighting of a UFO by Kenneth Arnold, a US pilot who saw UFOs in the sky in 1947. Marjorie Cameron eventually bought into the whole thing, and later said that a series of UFO sightings in Washington, DC, in 1952 — just after Parsons died — happened because Parsons was the person who had performed the ritual.
Parsons and Hubbard grew even closer, and Hubbard suggested they should take $20,000 (provided by Parsons), travel to Miami, buy three yachts, sail them through the Panama Canal and up the coast to California. Then they would sell the yachts for a profit. This was not really Hubbard’s plan; he had secretly gotten permission from the US Navy to sail to Central America, South America, and China, ostensibly to research stories he was writing. Parsons agreed to what he thought the plan was, but Hubbard immediately left with Parsons’ “new wife” Sara, and took half of Parsons’ money with him. The Hubbard and Sara actually did travel to Miami and they really did buy three yachts, but they abandoned the trip when the first storm appeared. Parsons, who was furious, was convinced he’d personally caused the storm with a Thelemnic magic (or magick) spell. Specifically, a “lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram containing an astrological, geomantic invocation of Bartzabel.” (Remember, this guy was literally a rocket scientist.) Then to make matters worse, at least in Parsons’ opinion, Hubbard and Sara got married, even though Hubbard was already married to Margaret Grubb. Hubbard and Sara worked together to found Scientology, and Hubbard and Parsons ended their friendship — but stayed business partners, at least for a while.
The Church of Scientology, by the way, issued a press release explaining that Hubbard was working as an undercover agent for the US government to “intercept and destroy Parsons’ black magic cult and save Sara from its influence.” They also explained that Robert Heinlein (another science fiction writer) was in charge of the operation. This supposed connection between the government and Heinlein as an undercover operative came up again later, as you’ll see.
In 1949, Parsons was investigated again by the FBI and by the House Un-American Activities Committee for whatever they could come up with. He lost his security clearance for a while.It was restored, but the damage was done and his rocketry career was over. He plunged even deeper into occultism, started publishing some fairly, um, eccentric articles, and founded a new Thelemite group that included his own material that differed from Crowley’s. He even offered a course in his beliefs for $10. And remember Margaret Cameron? She reappeared and they began a relationship.
Parsons and Cameron planned to travel to Mexico in 1952, where that government was interested in hiring Parsons to initiate an explosives factory. But the night before they left, Parsons unexpectedly received a rush order for explosives needed at a movie set. He had done similar work, and started working on the order in his home lab. Before he could complete it, though, was killed by an explosion. His colleagues, who knew Parsons to be fanatically careful and fastidious in his lab work, were suspicious. A number of them thought a conspiracy had taken place to assassinate Parsons. They differed, though, on the details. Some thought Howard Hughes was behind it. Hughes was another eccentric in the aerospace industry, and had employed Parsons for a while, but the two had parted ways less than amicably. Another theory was that someone had planted a bomb because of Parsons’ support (and work) for Israel. Another theory was that the explosion was supernatural in origin, and Parsons had been performing a Thelemic ritual that went wrong. And a couple even thought it was suicide. The police, though, conducted a very brief analysis, concluded the explosion had been an accident, and closed the case.
Parsons’ death, at age 37, has never been fully investigated or explained. His legacy in the aerospace industry is chiefly around the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his solid rocket fuel developments. His legacy in Thelema and other occult pursuits may or may not be known to people still involved in those areas, but they’re probably not talking.
