A closer look
Jet Propulsion Laboratory co-founder Jack Parsons was simultaneously a brilliant rocket scientist and an enthusiastic follower of Aleister Crowley's occult religion of Thelema. During the 1940s, Parsons attempted to summon a mythical goddess called the Babalon by performing elaborate sex magic rituals in his California mansion alongside science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard eventually stole Parsons' girlfriend and his money to go buy a yacht, leaving the heartbroken rocketeer to accidentally blow himself up in his home laboratory a few years later. It is a comforting thought that the same unhinged chaotic energy responsible for pioneering solid rocket fuel and putting humans in space was also entirely convinced that performing naked interpretive dances could conjure a demonic entity
