Jack Parsons

Jack Parsons was an American rocket propellant chemist and a co-founder, alongside Frank Malina and Edward Forman under Theodore von Karman's supervision, of the Caltech rocketry research group that grew into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, formally established under that name with military funding in 1943 after Nazi Germany's V-2 rocket demonstrated the strategic potential of the technology. Parsons's central technical contribution was the development of castable composite solid rocket propellants, most notably a formulation using liquid asphalt as a binding agent with potassium perchlorate as an oxidizer, which proved far more stable and powerful than earlier compressed-powder propellants and could be cast into a mold and stored indefinitely, making mass production of solid rocket motors practical; variants of his propellant approach were later used in vehicles including the Space Shuttle's solid rocket boosters. Parsons was also deeply involved in Thelemic occultism, leading the Agape Lodge of Aleister Crowley's religious order, and was defrauded of his savings in 1946 by L. Ron Hubbard, in an episode that preceded Hubbard's founding of Scientology; Parsons died in a home laboratory explosion in 1952.