He was an only child, his adulterous dad booted by his angry mom. In seeking father figures and brotherhood, he became a vital link in two mighty chains in human history: rocketry and ritual magic. His science was built on intuition, and his magic on experiment.
[…]
Pendle’s book, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons (Harcourt), tells the bizarre tale of a character whose innovations in rocket fuel design were vital to mankind’s leaving the surface of the planet. Simultaneous with his more material scientific pursuits, he also tried with painstaking ritual — but apparently failed — to create a “Moon Child,” a magic being conjured via mystic ritual who would usher in a new age of unfettered liberty and signal the end of the Christian era and its outmoded morality.
Parsons had no successful formal education beyond high school. Yet his deep knowledge of explosives, formed through early issues of Amazing Stories and stints with explosive powder companies, earned him a leading role in a small gang performing rocketry experiments at and around Caltech in the ’30s. In those days, rocket science was the province mostly of twisted dreamers, not serious scientists. His gang was not-so-affectionately dubbed the Suicide Squad for the series of alarming explosions they caused on campus. Eventually they were exiled to the Arroyo Seco canyon to conduct their experiments in discovering stable, usable rocket fuels. (They discovered plenty of unstable, unusable ones along the way.)