Daily MOS: Jack, Rockets, Sex, & Magic

“I hight Don Quixote, I live on Peyote,
marihuana, morphine and cocaine.
I never knew sadness but only a madness
that burns at the heart and brain.” -Jack Parsons

In a triumph of engineering, NASA’s Perseverance Rover became the newest Martian yesterday. It was manufactured at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which was originally launched by a group of pioneering rocket scientists including Jack Parsons, who likely scattered equal quantities of rocket fuel and cum across Pasadena in his short time on this Earth.

The life story of Jack Parsons could only be true because not even the worst of fiction writers would have the fucking audacity.

Today’s Moment of Science… the Marvel who jerked off with L. Ron Hubbard.

The history of rocketry dates back thousands of years, but the field advanced rapidly in the last century in no small part due to Jack Parsons. Along with his grade school friend Ed Forman, they came from the ‘fuck around and find out’ school of scientific discipline. They started experimenting with rockets in Parsons’ backyard in junior high, getting into plenty of trouble. As adults, along with colleague Frank Malina, they would be nicknamed the ‘suicide squad’ for their apparent indifference for their limbs.

Parsons’ mom tried to straighten him out by sending him to military school, but he was expelled for blowing up a toilet. So.

By the mid 1930s, degreeless and still barely old enough to grow peach fuzz, he was working at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, (GALCIT), becoming a principal scientist of the operation.

Rocket science wasn’t always referred to so deferrentially, and Parsons gave the field a great deal of the gravitas it carries today. Jet-assisted-take-off (JATO) was a revelation powered by a composite fuel Parsons concocted to replace an older, more unstable fuel. The usefulness and applications of this can’t be overstated. GALCIT was contracted to the military specifically for their JATO research. The legacy from this today is NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

But about Jack Parsons.

Do we start with the sex magick, the drugs, the cult, or the L. Ron Hubbard-ness of it all?

Aleister Crowley, noted occultist, introduced Parsons to the spiritual philosophy of Thelema and, more delightfully, sex magick. The theory was that, in the instant of an orgasm, you connected with the universe and could be granted a wish.
From the universe.
For blowing a load.
Which this pioneering rocket science bought right into.

(I guess because it literally wasn’t rocket science? I’ll see myself out.)

His mansion in Pasadena became a commune for a group of Thelema practitioners where there was, and I cannot stress this enough, constant fucking.

Parsons rented out rooms in his mansion to fellow Thelema practitioners. They would discuss their communist and socialist ideals over a joint or a pile of cocaine (it’s a long list of drugs, to be fair), and tried to do what everyone else in LA does; write a highly masturbatory script. Then the FBI investigated them because lol, Cold War. They lost their security clearances, which prevented them from participating in most government work.

So, about the Scientology guy.

Parsons and Hubbard got along famously. He moved into the orgy palace in 1945, and they had just the right mix of interests in science and abject fuckery to ping each others’ brains. It’s hard to tell what on the list in their relationship was weirdest, but I’m going with Parsons watching Hubbard having sex with Parsons’ girlfriend while Parsons jerked off onto piles of “magic tablets” while listening to music, hoping to summon the goddess Babalon. To fuck her, of course.

I know dating is super hard, but if you ever resort to jizz, magic, and cuckolding? Turn around.

Aleister Crowley said of Hubbard in a telegram “Suspect Ron playing confidence trick—Jack Parsons weak fool—obvious victim prowling swindlers.” He was right. Hubbard was a con man, and ran off with Parsons’ girlfriend and life savings, leaving him damn near penniless. He did odd jobs to keep the lights on.

Working on explosives for a movie set, there was an accidental explosion. Or, “accidental,” as some theorize. It felt suspicious to many that an expert of his calibre could make an error to such a disastrous degree. He died within an hour of the explosion on June 17th, 1952, at age 37.

This has been your daily Moment of Science, asking you to use the appropriate safety equipment for the job, be it a helmet or a condom.

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