You're nuts.
Posted on 05/31/2005 4:58:08 PM PDT by neverdem
He was an acolyte of Aleister Crowley, an employee of Howard Hughes, a victim of L. Ron Hubbard, and an enthusiastic phone buddy to Wernher Von Braun. He was an only child, his adulterous dad booted by his angry mom. In seeking father figures and brotherhood, he became a vital link in two mighty chains in human history: rocketry and ritual magic. His science was built on intuition, and his magic on experiment.
John Whiteside Parsons was born in 1914 and died in 1952. His short life is a fascinating case study in the limits and the contradictions of unbounded amateur enthusiasts, no matter how bold or brilliant. It limns both the conflicts and the codependency between freewheeling innovators and hidebound institutions, both governmental and private.
Though obscured by wild rumor and sinister presumptions, Parsons’ reputation has survived, clandestinely, among devotees of rockets and of magic. Those passions are united, notes Parsons’ new biographer George Pendle (a science writer for the London Times), by their “rebellions against the very limits of human existence.”
Pendle’s book, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons (Harcourt), tells the bizarre tale of a character whose innovations in rocket fuel design were vital to mankind’s leaving the surface of the planet. Simultaneous with his more material scientific pursuits, he also tried with painstaking ritual—but apparently failed—to create a “Moon Child,” a magic being conjured via mystic ritual who would usher in a new age of unfettered liberty and signal the end of the Christian era and its outmoded morality.
Parsons had no successful formal education beyond high school. Yet his deep knowledge of explosives, formed through early issues of Amazing Stories and stints with explosive powder companies, earned him a leading role in a small gang performing rocketry experiments at and around Caltech in the ’30s. In those days, rocket science was the province mostly of twisted dreamers, not serious scientists. His gang was not-so-affectionately dubbed the Suicide Squad for the series of alarming explosions they caused on campus. Eventually they were exiled to the Arroyo Seco canyon to conduct their experiments in discovering stable, usable rocket fuels. (They discovered plenty of unstable, unusable ones along the way.)
Caltech didn’t want to fund this reckless gang, drunk on the barely-controlled power at their fingertips. “With no official funding they had to pay for every bit of material they needed out of their own pockets,” Pendle notes. “They scoured junkyards for tube ends and pressure gauges and stripped old ovens bare for dials and piping.”
World War II changed that. The well-endowed U.S. military called upon these smoke-streaked stepchildren of Caltech, hoping to use their crazy rocket gadgets to propel planes into the air in places without adequate runways. Gradually the little gang of misfits evolved into the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. (JPL has far exceeded its humble origins. As Pendle notes, it “manufactured lunar landers and Mars landers, as well as…Voyager 1 and 2” and now employs 5,500 scientists on an annual budget of $1.4 billion.) Parsons designed new rocket fuel after rocket fuel, and eventually they succeeded in inventing jet-assisted take-off.
The military wasn’t designed for Parsons’ unconventional life- and workstyles. Neither was Aerojet Engineering, the company he founded with his Suicide Squad pals to make and sell rockets. It took staid money boys and military discipline to turn his ideas into an industrial machine. Parsons was bought out of Aerojet in 1944 for $11,000. (By the mid-’60s alone, Pendle notes, his shares would have been worth $12 million.)
While inventing the castable rocket fuel that made the space age possible, Parsons simultaneously explored the frontiers of inner space, building the other half of his weird reputation. He became enraptured with the writings of the British occultist Aleister Crowley and joined the L.A.-based Agape Lodge of Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis. Crowley’s American lieutenants seized on the charismatic and successful scientist as a potential savior for their movement; he began donating almost all his salary to the upkeep of his lodge brethren. His Crowleyan adoration of the unfettered human will inspired a fierce political libertarianism as well, best expressed in his essay “Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword.” (The other edge is responsibility.)
After the war his occult activism attracted the young L. Ron Hubbard into his life and home. The scalawag pulp writer, pre-Dianetics, took off for Florida with Jack’s girl and most of his money, supposedly to buy boats to bring to California and launch a business operation they’d jointly own. Hubbard never came back. The official Scientology line —unsupported by any evidence—is that Hubbard was sent by Naval Intelligence to break up Parsons’ evil occult sex ring.
As the ’40s wound down Parsons was stripped of his security clearance and almost prosecuted for treason for slipping classified documents from his then-employer, Hughes Aircraft, to the nascent Israeli government, with whom he was negotiating for a rocket guru gig. During his last days Parsons was reduced to working for Hollywood movies, making tiny explosive squibs that mimicked a man being shot. This from a man who once dreamed of blasting man into outer space. Some people regard the 1952 explosion that killed him in his Pasadena backyard lab as mysterious. One close pal, though, didn’t see much of a puzzle. He noted that “Jack used to sweat a lot and [a coffee can in which he was mixing explosives] just slipped out of his hand and blew him up.”
Parsons the science-fiction fan didn’t live to see the children of his greatest fuel invention bring man to the moon and man’s machinery to far planets. But some people remembered. A crater on the dark side of the Moon has been named after this man who believed he could summon spirits and who hoped to propel himself into space.
Parsons may not have had the discipline to get there. But the men and systems who did could never have done so without his reckless imagination—his belief that even the risk of blowing himself to pieces was worth it to propel humanity to what he saw as the next stage of its physical and spiritual evolution.
Senior Editor Brian Doherty is the author of This is Burning Man (Little, Brown).
You're nuts.
"The Magical Father of American Rocketry"
I read the article and kept wondering when they were going to write about Robert Goddard.
Goddard worked with liquid fuel rockets.
You're right. That's who Werner Von Braun said inspired him.
In the end, God is still alive -- and so is His "outmoded morality" -- while this nut cluster is splattered all over his workshop.
Goddard was messing around with rockets long before Parsons (unless I have had a brief Democratic moment).
I do not doubt this story yet, but I have no facts on this man other than what I just read.
However, I do know Goddard is called the father of American rocketry for good reason. I have read plenty about him.
What do you as the author or publisher, whoever decided the title, want to call it, "The Magical Father of American Solid Rocket Propellants"?
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Is parsons gay or something?
Exactly. Many media types will take every opportunity to slam Christianity and soft-pedal the occult.
"After the war his occult activism attracted the young L. Ron Hubbard into his life and home. The scalawag pulp writer, pre-Dianetics, took off for Florida with Jack’s girl and most of his money, supposedly to buy boats to bring to California and launch a business operation they’d jointly own. Hubbard never came back."
from: The Rocket Man
http://www.illuminati-news.com/rocketman.htm
Another connection to Aleister Crowley is one of his disciples - a self-taught chemist named John Whiteside Parsons (a.k.a. "Jack"). Werner von Braun called Jack Parsons the "true" father of American rocketry. Parsons was one of the original scientists involved in early rocket technology, specifically the chemical formulations for solid rocket fuel. He also did a great deal of work with jet assisted takeoffs, thereby allowing aircraft to take off from shorter runways. The group he worked with at the California Institute of Technology eventually morphed into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). It is curious, then, why Parsons's story is so foggy, to say the least.
see post #14: Goddard gave credit to Parsons
Your post said it was von Braun who mentioned Parsons, not Goddard..
Regardless, somehow Goddard received the recognition and Parsons has not, for some reason.
That sounds like half the fun.
Yeah: sorry - looking things up and posting without really seeing if I'm responding to the right questions. Another article that confirms Parsons' importance:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/030105C.html
"The explosion that killed him on June 17, 1952 was puzzling. Parsons, who had extensive experience with explosive materials, evidently had been working in his home lab in an uncharacteristically sloppy manner. Could this have been suicide or murder? The explanation, as Pendle shows, is probably less sinister. Parsons seems to have been distracted by an imminent trip to Mexico, and he was stirring chemicals in a tin coffee can because much of his equipment had recently been moved and was still packed away."
There but for the grace of God... I had a similar experience when I was a teen - but fortunately I was still scared enough of what I was doing that less than 0.5cc was being mixed. Parsons apparently didn't have enough accidents when he was younger to have learned that lesson.
Let's see if I have this right:
We have a guy who spends his teens playing with explosives. Despite his lack of training, in 1941 or '42 the US government is so desperate for additional rocket development that they contract to a company that this guy has formed, called Aerojet. By 1944 he is out of Aerojet, and out of the rocket fuel development business. He loses his security clearance after 1945 because he is a loose cannon. He is reduced to making a living building pyrotechnics for Hollywood and blows himself up that way in 1952.
And Oh By The Way, he was one of the first people to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Because of this three-year history (42-44) developing rocket motors for the US military in WWII he is credited with JPL's success in all future activities, and man getting to the Moon. This despite the fact that the only solid rocket on a Apollo-Saturn V was never used. (It was in the escape tower.)
Makes sense to me. Just about as much sense as an Oliver Stone movie.
http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/132_parsons.shtml
"By August 1941, these tests had produced rockets stable enough to use as bolt-on jet-assisted-take-off (JATO) [1] units for military aircraft. Daring experiments, probably the first of their kind in the world, were also made with no less than 12 of these 28lb/12-second thrust units fitted to an Ercoupe light aircraft. With its propeller removed, the hobby-plane soared and landed. Thus a mail-order aircraft became the first rocket aircraft of America, and therefore the direct primitive ancestor of the air-launched Bell X1 which Chuck Yeager took through the sound barrier in 1947.
"Post-war, these JATO "bottles" grew into the liquid-fuel Corporal rocket, and the solid-fuelled Sergeant. The much-vaunted Germans were surprisingly way behind in solid-fuel technology, which Parsons? pioneered. From his work there arose a whole range of first-generation American missiles, including the solid-fuelled submarine-launched Polaris. "
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.