Portal:Greater Los Angeles/Selected biography/5



John Whiteside Parsons (born Marvel Whiteside Parsons; October 2, 1914 – June 17, 1952), better known as Jack Parsons, was an American rocket engineer, chemist, and Thelemite occultist. A pioneer in solid-fuel rocket research and development, he was the inventor of the first castable,  composite solid-propellant rocket. He was affiliated with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation.

Born in Los Angeles, California, Parsons was raised into a wealthy family in Pasadena. Inspired by science fiction literature, he developed an early interest in rocketry and in 1928 began amateur rocket experiments with school friend Edward Forman. He was forced to drop out of Pasadena Junior College and Stanford University due to financial difficulties during the Great Depression, but in 1934 he united with Forman and graduate student Frank Malina to form the Caltech-affiliated GALCIT Rocket Research Group, supported by Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory chairman Theodore von Kármán. In 1939 they gained funding from the National Academy of Sciences to work on Jet-Assisted Take Off (JATO) for the U.S. military, and upon this expansion renamed themselves the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 1942 they founded Aerojet to develop and sell their JATO technology.

After a brief involvement in Marxism, in 1939 Parsons converted to Thelema, the English occultist Aleister Crowley's new religious movement. In 1941 he joined the Agape Lodge, the Californian branch of the Thelemite Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). At Crowley's bidding, he took over the position of lodge leader from Wilfred Talbot Smith in 1942 and ran it from his manor on Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena. With his friend L. Ron Hubbard he began the Babalon Working, a series of rituals designed to invoke the Thelemic goddess Babalon to Earth. Parsons continued the procedure with Marjorie Cameron, whom he married in 1946. After Hubbard stole his life savings, Parsons resigned from the OTO and went through various jobs while acting as a consultant for Israel's rocket program. Amid the climate of McCarthyism he was accused of espionage and left unable to work in rocketry. Parsons died in a home laboratory explosion at the age of 37; the police ruled it an accident, but many associates suspected suicide or murder.

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