The moon has a crater named after Jack Parsons. It's on the far side—the dark side—which is kinda perfect for a man whose life felt like a collision between high-stakes science and the deep occult. If you look at NASA’s official heritage today, you’ll see the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as the crown jewel of robotic space exploration. But if you dig into the 1930s, the "J" in JPL didn't stand for Jet. Not really. Locally, people called the founders the "Suicide Squad."
Jack Parsons wasn't your typical NASA hero. He didn't have a PhD. Honestly, he never even finished his undergraduate degree. He was a self-taught chemist who spent his weekends in the California brush blowing things up. He was also a high-ranking member of a sex cult.
The Suicide Squad and the Birth of JPL
In 1936, rocketry was a joke. It was the stuff of Buck Rogers serials, not "serious" science. At Caltech, the aeronautics bigwigs thought rockets were toys. But Parsons, along with his friend Ed Forman and a graduate student named Frank Malina, didn't care. They started testing motors in the Arroyo Seco, a dry canyon in Pasadena.
Their first big test happened on Halloween. Fitting, right?
They were trying to build a liquid-fuel motor. It leaked. It caught fire. It nearly killed them. But it worked. This ragtag group eventually got a tiny bit of funding from the military because the Army wanted a way to get heavy planes off short runways. They called it JATO (Jet-Assisted Take-Off). Because "rocket" sounded too much like science fiction, they used the word "jet" to sound more professional. That’s why we have the Jet Propulsion Laboratory today. Without Jack Parsons of NASA fame—or rather, the pre-NASA era—we wouldn't have the solid rocket boosters that lifted the Space Shuttle.
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Solid Fuel and the Asphalt Epiphany
The biggest problem with early rockets was the fuel. Liquid was dangerous. Solid powder was unstable; it would crack, and then the whole thing would explode like a giant pipe bomb.
Parsons had a "Eureka" moment while watching roofers. He saw them pouring hot tar—asphalt—and realized it was the perfect binder. If you mixed an oxidizer into that gooey mess, it would burn steady and slow. This invention of castable composite propellant changed everything. It’s basically the DNA of modern rocketry. Every Polaris missile and every strap-on booster used to get humans into orbit owes a debt to Jack’s kitchen-sink chemistry.
Sex, Magick, and Aleister Crowley
While he was building the foundation of American aerospace by day, Parsons was doing something much stranger at night. He had discovered the writings of Aleister Crowley, the infamous British occultist known as "The Wickedest Man in the World."
Parsons became the head of the Agape Lodge, a branch of Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.). He lived in a massive mansion in Pasadena called "The Parsonage." It was a wild place. He rented rooms to bohemians, scientists, and literal witches. There were reports of ritual "magick," animal sacrifices, and "sex magick" intended to manifest a goddess on Earth.
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He didn't hide it. He’d walk into JPL meetings smelling like strange incense. Sometimes he’d chant to the Greek god Pan before a rocket test. His bosses at Caltech tolerated it because, well, he was the only one who could make the rockets stop exploding.
The L. Ron Hubbard Connection
Then came L. Ron Hubbard. Before he founded Scientology, Hubbard was a pulp sci-fi writer who ended up living at Parsons’ mansion. They became fast friends. They even performed a series of rituals called the Babalon Working.
It didn't end well for Jack.
Hubbard eventually ran off with Parsons’ girlfriend (Sara Northrup) and a huge chunk of his life savings. They bought a fleet of boats and headed for Florida. Parsons was devastated. He tried to "summon a storm" to sink their boat, but mostly he just ended up suing them. He got a small settlement, but his reputation was in tatters.
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The Tragic End in a Pasadena Garage
By the late 1940s, the Cold War was heating up. The FBI started looking into the "weirdo" who founded JPL. They didn't like his occult ties, and they definitely didn't like his brief flirtation with Marxism. He lost his security clearance. The man who paved the way for the moon landings was suddenly banned from working in his own field.
He spent his final years working as a special effects consultant for Hollywood and mixing chemicals in his home lab.
On June 17, 1952, a massive explosion rocked Pasadena. It was Jack's lab. The floorboards were ripped up. Windows a block away shattered. Parsons was found in the rubble, still conscious but missing limbs. He died shortly after at the hospital. He was only 37.
Some say it was an accident—he dropped a vial of mercury fulminate. Others whisper about assassination or a "magickal" experiment gone wrong.
Why Jack Parsons Still Matters
You can't talk about the history of space travel without him. Even if NASA doesn't always put him on the brochures, the engineers know. Wernher von Braun once said Parsons was the true father of the American space program.
What you can do next:
If you're ever in Pasadena, hike down into the Arroyo Seco near the Devil’s Gate Dam. That’s the exact spot where the first tests happened. You can still feel the history there. If you want to dive deeper, read Strange Angel by George Pendle. It’s the definitive biography and digs into the FBI files that eventually brought Parsons down. It shows how the same "madness" that lets a man believe he can talk to spirits is the same madness required to believe we can reach the stars.