Backdrop On October 31, 2025, Pastor Gary McKibben and I conducted a livestream titled Per Aspera Ad Astra—Latin for “through hardship to the stars”—a phrase famously embraced by Jack Parsons, one of the godfathers of America’s early space program. In that discussion, we traced the modern rocketry enterprise back to Parsons and his notorious, explosion-prone circle of engineers at Caltech and JPL, sometimes nicknamed the “Suicide Squad.” Yet Parsons’s obsession extended far beyond propulsion and pyrotechnics. By the mid-1940s, he was deeply immersed in the ritual occultism of Aleister Crowley and Crowley’s system of Thelema, attempting to merge technological ascent...