1. Jack Parsons was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Aerojet.
109 Facts About Jack Parsons
1. 2.
Jack Parsons invented the first rocket engine to use a castable, composite rocket propellant, and pioneered the advancement of both liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets.
3.
Jack Parsons began amateur rocket experiments with school friend Edward Forman in 1928.
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Jack Parsons was admitted to Stanford University but left before graduating due to financial hardship during the Great Depression.
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In 1939, Jack Parsons converted to Thelema, a religious movement founded by English occultist Aleister Crowley.
6.
Jack Parsons was dismissed from JPL and Aerojet in 1944, due to his involvement with OT.
7.
Jack Parsons worked as an explosives expert during the late 1940s, but his career in rocketry ended due to accusations of espionage and the increasing trend of McCarthyism.
8.
Jack Parsons died at the age of 37 in a home laboratory explosion in 1952; his death was officially ruled an accident but many of his associates suspected suicide or murder.
9.
Jack Parsons has been the subject of several biographies and fictionalized portrayals.
10.
Marvel Whiteside Jack Parsons was born on October 2,1914, at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles.
11.
Jack Parsons's father returned to Massachusetts after being exposed as an adulterer, with Ruth forbidding him from having any contact with his infant son.
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Marvel Parsons later joined the US Armed Forces, reaching the rank of major, and married a woman with whom he had a son, Charles, a half-brother Jack only met once.
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Jack Parsons had begun to investigate occultism, and performed a ritual intended to invoke the Devil into his bedroom; he worried that the invocation was successful and was frightened into ceasing these activities.
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The Jack Parsons family spent mid-1929 touring Europe before returning to Pasadena, where they moved into a house on San Rafael Avenue.
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Jack Parsons began studying at the privately run University School, a liberal institution that took an unconventional approach to teaching.
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Jack Parsons flourished academically, becoming editor of the school newspaper, El Universitano, and winning an award for literary excellence; teachers who had trained at the nearby California Institute of Technology guided his attention to the study of chemistry.
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Jack Parsons graduated from University School in 1933, and moved with his mother and grandmother to a more modest house on St John Avenue, where he continued to pursue his interests in literature and poetry.
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Jack Parsons enrolled in Pasadena Junior College with the hope of earning an associate degree in physics and chemistry, but dropped out after one term because of his financial situation and took up permanent employment at the Hercules Powder Company.
19.
Jack Parsons saved money in hopes of continuing his academic studies and began a degree in chemistry at Stanford University, but found the tuition unaffordable and returned to Pasadena.
20.
The trio focused their distinct skills on collaborative rocket development; Jack Parsons was the chemist, Forman the machinist, and Malina the technical theoretician.
21.
Jack Parsons met Helen Northrup at a local church dance and proposed marriage in July 1934.
22.
Jack Parsons accepted and they were married in April 1935 at the Little Church of the Flowers in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, before undertaking a brief honeymoon in San Diego.
23.
Jack Parsons himself gained further media publicity when he appeared as an expert explosives witness in the trial of Captain Earl Kynette, the head of police intelligence in Los Angeles who was accused of conspiring to set a car bomb in the attempted murder of private investigator Harry Raymond, a former LAPD detective who was fired after whistleblowing against police corruption.
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Jack Parsons was introduced to leading members Regina Kahl, Jane Wolfe, and Wilfred Talbot Smith at the mass.
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Jack Parsons continued to read Crowley's works, which increasingly interested him, and encouraged Helen to read them.
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Jack Parsons came to believe in the reality of Thelemic magick as a force that could be explained through quantum physics.
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Jack Parsons tried to interest his friends and acquaintances in Thelema, taking science fiction writers Jack Williamson and Cleve Cartmill to a performance of The Gnostic Mass.
28.
Jack Parsons adopted the Thelemic motto of Thelema Obtenteum Proedero Amoris Nuptiae, a Latin mistranslation of "The establishment of Thelema through the rituals of love".
29.
The FBI was satisfied that Parsons was not a Marxist but were concerned when Thelemite friend Paul Seckler used Parsons' gun in a drunken car hijacking, for which Seckler was imprisoned in San Quentin State Prison for two years.
30.
The solid JATO fuel invented by Jack Parsons consisted of amide, corn starch, and ammonium nitrate bound together in the JATO unit with glue and blotting paper.
31.
Jack Parsons theorized that this was because the ammonium nitrate became dangerously combustible following overnight storage, during which temperature and consistency changes had resulted in a chemical imbalance.
32.
Jack Parsons, Summerfield and the GALCIT workers focused on the task and found success with a combination of gasoline with red fuming nitric acid as its oxidizer; the latter, suggested by Jack Parsons, was an effective substitute for liquid oxygen.
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Jack Parsons tried to resolve GALCIT-27's stability issue with GALCIT-46, which replaced the former's ammonium nitrate with guanidine nitrate.
34.
Malina recounted that Jack Parsons was inspired to use asphalt by the ancient incendiary weapon Greek fire; in a 1982 talk for the International Association of Astronomical Artists Captain Boushey stated that Jack Parsons experienced an epiphany after watching workers using molten asphalt to fix tiles onto a roof.
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Company heads including Jack Parsons were exempted from this austerity, drawing the ire of many personnel.
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Jack Parsons became a regular at the Manana Literary Society, which met in Laurel Canyon at the home of Parsons' friend Robert A Heinlein and included science fiction writers including Cleve Cartmill, Jack Williamson, and Anthony Boucher.
37.
Jack Parsons decorated his new room with a copy of the Stele of Revealing, a statue of Pan, and his collection of swords and daggers.
38.
Jack Parsons converted the garage and laundry room into a chemical laboratory and often held science fiction discussion meetings in the kitchen, and entertained the children with hunts for fairies in the 25-acre garden.
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When Jack Parsons paid for her to have an abortion, McMurtry was angered and their friendship broke down.
40.
Smith remained skeptical as Crowley's analysis was seemingly deliberately devised in Jack Parsons' favor, encouraging Smith to step down from his role in the Agape Lodge and instructing him to take a meditative retreat.
41.
Jack Parsons demonstrated the efficacy of the newer JATOs to solve this issue by equipping a Grumman plane with solid-fuel units; its assisted takeoff from the USS Charger was successful, but produced smoke containing a noxious, yellow-colored residue.
42.
Haley persuaded them to sell their stock, resulting in Jack Parsons leaving the company with $11,000.
43.
Jack Parsons continued to financially support Smith and Helen, although he asked for a divorce from her and ignored Crowley's commands by welcoming Smith back to the Parsonage when his retreat was finished.
44.
Science fiction writer and US Navy officer L Ron Hubbard soon moved into the Parsonage; he and Parsons became close friends.
45.
Jack Parsons is the most Thelemic person I have ever met and is in complete accord with our own principles.
46.
Jack Parsons reported paranormal events in the house resulting from the rituals; including poltergeist activity, sightings of orbs and ghostly apparitions, alchemical effect on the weather, and disembodied voices.
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Pendle suggested that Jack Parsons was particularly susceptible to these interpretations and attributed the voices to a prank by Hubbard and Sara.
48.
In December 1945, Jack Parsons began a series of rituals based on Enochian magic during which he masturbated onto magical tablets, accompanied by Sergei Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto.
49.
Jack Parsons allowed Hubbard to take part as his "scribe", believing that he was particularly sensitive to detecting magical phenomena.
50.
When Cameron departed for a trip to New York, Jack Parsons retreated to the desert, where he believed that a preternatural entity psychographically provided him with Liber 49, which represented a fourth part of Crowley's The Book of the Law, the primary sacred text of Thelema, as well as part of a new sacred text he called the Book of Babalon.
51.
Jack Parsons co-founded a company called Allied Enterprises with Hubbard and Sara, into which Jack Parsons invested his life savings of $20,970.
52.
Jack Parsons agreed, but many of his friends thought it was a bad idea.
53.
Jack Parsons was employed by North American Aviation at Inglewood, where he worked on the Navaho Missile Program.
54.
When Cameron developed catalepsy, Jack Parsons referred her to Sylvan Muldoon's books on astral projection, suggesting that she could manipulate her seizures to accomplish it.
55.
Jack Parsons continued to be seen as a specialist in rocketry; he acted as an expert consultant in numerous industrial tribunals and police and Army Ordnance investigations regarding explosions.
56.
In May 1947, Jack Parsons gave a talk at the Pacific Rocket Society in which he predicted that rockets would take humans to the Moon.
57.
Jack Parsons speculated in a June 1949 letter to Germer that his clearance was revoked in response to his public dissemination of Crowley's Liber OZ, a 1941 tract summarizing the individualist moral principles of Thelema.
58.
In reaction to this hostile treatment, Jack Parsons sought work in the rocket industry abroad.
59.
Jack Parsons again resorted to bootlegging nitroglycerin for money, and managed to earn a wage as a car mechanic, a manual laborer at a gas station, and a hospital orderly; for two years he was a faculty member at the USC Department of Pharmacology.
60.
Jack Parsons was visited by Jane Wolfe, who unsuccessfully appealed for him to rejoin the dilapidated OT.
61.
Jack Parsons entered a brief relationship with an Irishwoman named Gladis Gohan; they moved to a house in Redondo Beach, a building known by them as the "Concrete Castle".
62.
Cameron returned to Redondo Beach from San Miguel de Allende and violently argued with Jack Parsons upon discovering his infidelity, before she again left for Mexico.
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Jack Parsons responded by initiating divorce proceedings against her on the grounds of "extreme cruelty".
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Jack Parsons testified to a closed federal court that the moral philosophy of Thelema was both anti-fascist and anti-communist, emphasizing his belief in individualism.
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In November 1950, as the Red Scare intensified, Jack Parsons decided to migrate to Israel to pursue Rosenfeld's offer, but a Hughes secretary whom Jack Parsons had asked to type up a portfolio of technical documents reported him to the FBI.
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Jack Parsons accused Parsons of espionage and attempted theft of classified company documents on the basis of some of the reports that he had sought to submit to the Technion Society.
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Jack Parsons was immediately fired from Hughes; the FBI investigated the complaint and were suspicious that Jack Parsons was spying for the Israeli government.
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Jack Parsons denied the allegations when interrogated; he insisted that his intentions were peaceful and that he had suffered an error of judgment in procuring the documents.
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In October 1951, the US attorney decided that because the contents of the reports did not constitute state secrets, Jack Parsons was not guilty of espionage.
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Jack Parsons reconciled with Cameron, and they resumed their relationship and moved into a former coach house on Orange Grove Boulevard.
71.
Jack Parsons converted its large, first-floor laundry room into a home laboratory to work on his chemical and pyrotechnic projects, homebrew absinthe and stockpile his materials.
72.
Jack Parsons founded a new Thelemite group known as "the Witchcraft", whose beliefs revolved around a simplified version of Crowley's Thelema and Jack Parsons' own Babalon prophecies.
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Jack Parsons offered a course in its teachings for a ten-dollar fee, which included a new Thelemic belief system called "the Gnosis", a version of Christian Gnosticism with Sophia as its godhead and the Christian God as its demiurge.
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Jack Parsons collaborated with Cameron on Songs for the Witch Woman, a collection of poems which she illustrated that was published in 2014.
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Jack Parsons was particularly disturbed by the presence of the FBI, convinced that they were spying on him.
76.
On June 17,1952, a day before their planned departure, Jack Parsons received a rush order of explosives for a film set and began to work on it in his home laboratory.
77.
An explosion destroyed the lower part of the building, during which Jack Parsons sustained mortal wounds.
78.
Jack Parsons tried to communicate with the arriving ambulance workers, who rushed him to the Huntington Memorial Hospital, where he was declared dead approximately thirty-seven minutes after the explosion.
79.
Pasadena Police Department criminologist Don Harding led the official investigation; he concluded that Jack Parsons had been mixing fulminate of mercury in a coffee can when he dropped it on the floor, causing an initial explosion that triggered a larger blast among other chemicals in the room.
80.
Forman considered this likely, stating that Jack Parsons often had sweaty hands and could easily have dropped the can.
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Some of Jack Parsons' colleagues rejected this explanation, saying that he was very attentive about safety.
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Jack Parsons found a morphine-filled syringe at the scene, suggesting that Parsons had been under the influence of narcotics.
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One of Cameron's friends, the artist Renate Druks, later stated her belief that Jack Parsons had died in a rite designed to create a homunculus.
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Beehan said that Jack Parsons "liked to wander, but he was one of the top men in the field".
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Jack Parsons later tried to perform astral projection to commune with him.
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Jack Parsons was considered effeminate as a child; in adult life he exhibited an attitude of machismo.
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Jack Parsons was known for personal eccentricity such as greeting house guests with a large pet snake around his neck, driving to work in a rundown Pontiac, and using a mannequin dressed in a tuxedo with a bucket labelled "The Resident" as his mailbox.
88.
Jack Parsons enjoyed playing pranks on his colleagues, often through detonating explosives such as firecrackers and smoke bombs, and was known to spend hours at a time in the bathtub playing with toy boats while living at the Parsonage.
89.
Jack Parsons had attended lectures on Theosophy by philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti with his first wife Helen, but disliked the belief system's sentiment of "the good and the true".
90.
Jack Parsons took to addressing Crowley as his "Most Beloved Father" and signed off to him as "thy son, John".
91.
In July 1945, Jack Parsons gave a speech to the Agape Lodge, in which he attempted to explain how he felt that The Book of the Law could be made relevant to "modern life".
92.
Jack Parsons identified four obstacles that prevented humans from achieving and performing their True Will, all of which he connected with fear: the fear of incompetence, the fear of the opinion of others, the fear of hurting others, and the fear of insecurity.
93.
Jack Parsons had the foresight to see that [the United States of] America, once armed with the new powers of total destruction and surveillance that were sure to follow the swelling flood of new technologies, had the potential to become even more repressive unless its founding principles of individual liberty were religiously preserved and its leaders held accountable to them.
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Jack Parsons knew that these potent forces, embodied as they are in a majority of the world's population, had the power, once unleashed, to change the world.
95.
From early on in his career, Jack Parsons took an interest in socialism and communism, views that he shared with his friend Frank Malina.
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Under the influence of another friend, Sidney Weinbaum, the two joined a communist group in the late 1930s, with Jack Parsons reading Marxist literature, but he remained unconvinced and refused to join the American Communist Party.
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Malina asserted that this was because Jack Parsons was a "political romantic", whose attitude was more anti-authoritarian than anti-capitalist.
98.
Jack Parsons was politically influenced by Thelema, which holds to the ethical code of "Do what thou wilt".
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Wilson argued in this context that Jack Parsons was an influence on the American libertarian and anarchist movements of the 20th century.
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Jack Parsons was supportive of the creation of the State of Israel.
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Jack Parsons made plans to emigrate there when his military security clearance was revoked.
102.
For instance, English Thelemite Kenneth Grant suggested that Jack Parsons' Babalon Working marked the start of the appearance of flying saucers in the skies, leading to phenomena such as the Roswell UFO incident and Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting.
103.
In 1954 she portrayed Babalon in American Thelemite Kenneth Anger's short film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, viewing this cinematic depiction of a Thelemic ritual as aiding the literal invocation of Babalon begun by Jack Parsons' working, and later said that his Book of the AntiChrist prophecies were fulfilled through the manifestation of Babalon in her person.
104.
Many of Jack Parsons' writings were posthumously published as Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword in 1989, a compilation co-edited by Cameron and OT.
105.
Wilson believed that Jack Parsons was "the one single individual who contributed the most to rocket science", describing him as being "very strange, very brilliant, very funny, [and] very tormented", and considering it noteworthy that the day of Jack Parsons' birth was the predicted beginning of the apocalypse advocated by Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the Bible Student movement.
106.
Jack Parsons' mythology was incorporated into the narrative of David Lynch's mystery-horror television series Twin Peaks.
107.
Jack Parsons appears as a side character in China Mieville's 2016 fantastical novella, The Last Days of New Paris.
108.
In 2018, Jack Parsons was featured in an episode of the Amazon series Lore.
109.
Jack Parsons is the subject of musical tributes by Johan Johannson, Six Organs of Admittance, The Claypool Lennon Delirium, and Luke Haines and Peter Buck.