magicking or the jack parsons‘ project

One of the pioneering rocketry engineers outside of the German camp (corresponding with many of the scientists who would comprise Operation Paperclip) was an individual named Marvel Whiteside (Jack) Parsons, who inspired by science fiction went on invent jet fuel and various techniques for improving thrust and guidance that solidified America’s standing in aerospace industry and helped the nation realise better the potential of the applications, was a founding member of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) after the Great Depression subsided.
Parsons’ interest in science fiction also made him impressionable to the useful imaginations of others, and after a brief stint as a devoted Marxist (which might have proven highly-suspect later on), Parsons turned to the new occult religion Thelema, dicated a few decades earlier by British philosopher and prestidigitator Aleister Crowley, having received these revelations whilst vacationing in Cairo from a præter-human law-giver. In the tradition of humanist writer François Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Thelema maintains that man was the measure of all things through tantric sacraments and magick (the Force explained in terms of the new Quantum Mechanics) admits of a complex cosmology and ritual acts, including one which Parsons and his friend L Ron Hubbard (who, cogently I suppose, later went on to found the Church of Scientology) performed in order to summon one goddess known as the Mother of Abominations. Ever the champion of research and space exploration, Parsons continued his aerospace experiments undeterred, offering free-lance services to Mexico and Israel, after he was dismissed from JPL for his infamous behaviour and accused of un-American activities. Under somewhat mysterious circumstances, Parsons died working on some pyrotechnic special effects for an upcoming Hollywood film in his home laboratory—the Parsonage. Though Parsons did not live to see the Space Race that he enabled and some miraculous achievements in exploration and understanding of the Cosmos, his legacy, despite how it might have been deprecated and over-shadowed, remains undeniable.