- Pendle, George.
Strange Angel.
New York: Harcourt, 2005.
ISBN 978-0-15-603179-0.
-
For those who grew up after World War II
“rocket science” meant something extremely
difficult, on the very edge of the possible, pursued by
the brightest of the bright, often at risk of death
or dire injury. In the first half of the century,
however, “rocket” was a pejorative, summoning
images of pulp magazines full of “that Buck Rogers
stuff”, fireworks that went fwoosh—flash—bang
if all went well, and often in the other order when it
didn't, with aspiring rocketeers borderline lunatics who
dreamed of crazy things like travelling to the Moon but
usually ended blowing things up, including, but not limited
to, themselves.
This was the era in which John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons
came of age. Parsons was born and spent most of his life in
Pasadena, California, a community close enough to Los Angeles
to participate in its frontier, “anything goes” culture,
but also steeped in well-heeled old wealth, largely made in the
East and seeking the perpetually clement climate of southern
California. Parsons was attracted to things that went fwoosh
and bang from the very start. While still a high school
senior, he was hired by the Hercules Powder Company, and continued
to support himself as an explosives chemist for the rest of his
life. He never graduated from college, no less pursued an
advanced degree, but his associates and mentors, including legends
such as
Theodore von Kármán
were deeply impressed by his knowledge and meticulously
careful work with dangerous substances and gave him their
highest recommendations. On several occasions he was called
as an expert witness to testify in high-profile trials involving
bombings.
And yet, at the time, to speak seriously about rockets was as
outré as to admit one was a fan of “scientifiction”
(later science fiction), or a believer in magic. Parsons was
all-in on all of them. An avid reader of science fiction and
member of the
Los
Angeles Science Fantasy Society, Parsons rubbed shoulders with
Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Forrest J. Ackerman. On the
darker side, Parsons became increasingly involved in the
Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO),
followers of
Aleister Crowley, and
practitioners of his “magick”. One gets the sense that
Parsons saw no conflict whatsoever among these pursuits—all
were ways to transcend the prosaic everyday life and explore a
universe enormously larger and stranger than even that of Los Angeles
and its suburbs.
Parsons and his small band of rocket enthusiasts, “the
suicide squad”, formed an uneasy alliance with the aeronautical
laboratory of the California Institute of Technology, and with
access to their resources and cloak of respectability, pursued
their dangerous experiments first on campus, and then after
a few embarrassing misadventures, in Arroyo Seco behind Pasadena.
With the entry of the United States into World War II, the armed
services had difficult problems to solve which overcame the
giggle factor of anything involving the word “rocket”.
In particular, the U.S. Navy had an urgent need to launch
heavily-laden strike aircraft from short aircraft carrier
decks (steam catapults were far in the future), and were
willing to consider even Buck Rogers rockets to get them
off the deck. Well, at least as long as you didn't call them
“rockets”! So, the Navy sought to procure “Jet
Assisted Take-Off” units, and Caltech created the
“Jet Propulsion Laboratory” with Parsons as
a founder to develop them, and then its members founded the
Aerojet Engineering Corporation to build them in
quantity. Nope, no rockets around here, nowhere—just
jets.
Even as Parsons' rocket dreams came true and began to make him
wealthy, he never forsook his other interests: they were all
integral to him. He advanced in Crowley's OTO, became a
regular correspondent of the Great Beast, and proprietor of
the OTO lodge in Pasadena, home to a motley crew of bohemians
who prefigured the beatniks and hippies of the 1950s and '60s.
And he never relinquished his interest in science fiction,
taking author
L. Ron Hubbard
into his community. Hubbard, a world class grifter even in his
early days, took off with Parsons' girlfriend and most of his
savings on the promise of buying yachts in Florida and selling them
at a profit in California. Uh-huh! I'd put it down to destructive
engrams.
Amidst all of this turmoil, Parsons made one of the most
important inventions in practical rocketry of the 20th
century. Apart from the work of Robert Goddard, which
occurred largely disconnected from others due to Goddard's
obsessive secrecy due to his earlier humiliation by learned
ignoramuses, and the work by the German rocket team, conducted
in secrecy in Nazi Germany, rockets mostly meant
solid rockets, and solid rockets were little changed from
mediaeval China: tubes packed with this or that variant
of black powder which went fwoosh all at once when
ignited. Nobody before Parsons saw an alternative to this.
When faced by the need for a reliable, storable, long-duration burn
propellant for Navy JATO boosters, he came up with the idea of
castable solid propellant (initially based upon asphalt and
potassium perchlorate), which could be poured as a liquid into
a booster casing with a grain shape which permitted tailoring
the duration and thrust profile of the motor to the mission
requirements. Every single solid rocket motor used today
employs this technology, and Jack Parsons, high school graduate
and self-taught propulsion chemist, invented it all by
himself.
On June 17th, 1952, an explosion destroyed a structure on
Pasadena's Orange Grove Avenue where Jack Parsons had set up
his home laboratory prior to his planned departure with his
wife to Mexico. He said he had just one more job to do for
his client, a company producing explosives for Hollywood
special effects. Parsons was gravely injured and pronounced dead
at the hospital.
The life of Jack Parsons was one which could only have occurred
in the time and place he lived it. It was a time when a small
band of outcasts could have seriously imagined building a rocket
and travelling to the Moon; a time when the community they lived
in was aboil with new religions, esoteric cults, and alternative
lifestyles; and an entirely new genre of fiction was
exploring the ultimate limits of the destiny of humanity
and its descendents. Jack swam in this sea and relished it.
His short life (just 37 years) was lived in a time and place
which has never existed before and likely will never exist
again. The work he did, the people he influenced, and
the consequences cast a long shadow still visible today (every
time you see a solid rocket booster heave a launcher off
the pad, its coruscant light, casting that shadow, is Jack Parsons'
legacy). This is a magnificent account of a singular life
which changed our world, and is commemorated on the rock
next door. On the lunar far side the 40 kilometre diameter crater
Parsons
is named for the man who dreamt of setting foot, by rocketry or
magick, upon that orb and, in his legacy, finally did with a
big footprint indeed—more than eight times larger than
the one named for that
Armstrong
fellow.
July 2012 