Stranger Than We Can Imagine (21 page)

Observations of the universe improved continually over the century. It became apparent that the air pollution over London hindered the work of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, so the telescopes were packed away in 1948 and moved down to the clearer air of Herstmonceux in Sussex. Omphaloi may claim to be fixed points, but they never last. By 1984 Sussex was also deemed unsuitable, so the observatory was moved to the Canary Islands. High altitude and remote locations provided the greatest views of the heavens, so telescopes were built in locations in Chile, California and Hawaii. Even these began to show their limits, and some of our greatest telescopes are now placed above the atmosphere, in orbit around the planet. As a result the level of detail in our images of space increased exponentially during the twentieth century.

It gradually became apparent that the cosmos wasn’t just sitting there, eternal and unchanging. The universe was expanding, like a balloon being inflated. And if the universe was expanding, then it stood to reason that it used to be smaller. If you went far enough back in time it would get smaller and smaller until it had shrunk down to nothing. This was the birth of the universe, the moment when the cosmos was born out of the void. In 1949 the English astronomer Fred Hoyle memorably described this as a ‘Big Bang’, although the event he described wasn’t big and didn’t go bang. This was, in theological terms, something of a game-changer. The universe was no longer ‘just there’, supporting us. It had been born, it was growing and one day, perhaps, it would die.

Our knowledge of the universe grew as our telescopes improved, and as a result mankind’s relative importance grew smaller and
smaller. The universe turned out to be full of clumps of stars called galaxies, such as our own local clump the Milky Way. These vary in size but can contain as many as a hundred trillion stars. There are believed to be more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Writing numbers like ‘170 billion’ or ‘a hundred trillion’ is in many ways a pointless exercise, because those words in no way convey the quantity that they represent. Should a person even begin to glimpse what those figures represented, they would immediately need to sit down and have a strong drink. If they truly understood the scale of those trillions they would be off work for quite some time.

In the twentieth century we looked out into space, and discovered that we couldn’t grasp how big it was without causing our minds to snap. This, then, was the frontier we were planning on crossing. This was the final frontier, a non-infinite infinity which could generate awe like nothing the human race had encountered before. It was time to leave home and take our first steps outside.

When he was a young boy growing up in pre-war California, Marvel Whiteside Parsons loved science fiction stories such as those found in Hugo Gernsback’s
Amazing Stories
magazine. A particular favourite was Jules Verne’s novel
From the Earth to the Moon
.

The idea that a rocket could leave the earth’s atmosphere and travel to the moon was considered as fanciful then as a time machine is today. Rockets had existed for thousands of years, ever since the Chinese invented gunpowder, and their inclusion in ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ (‘… and the rocket’s red glare’) gave them a place in the American psyche. But they did not scale in a way which made journeys into space appear possible. The weight of the required fuel and the structural integrity needed to control such force seemed to be insurmountable obstacles. A 1931 textbook declared that there was ‘no hope’ that rockets would lead to space flight, and that ‘only those who are unfamiliar with the physical factors involved believe that such adventures will ever pass beyond the realm of fancy.’ As late as 1940 Dr John Stewart, the Associate Professor
of Astronomical Physics at Princeton University, wrote that while a rocket trip to the moon wasn’t theoretically impossible he didn’t expect it to happen before 2050. He had no idea that, the previous October, Nazi rocket scientists had launched a rocket to an altitude of almost sixty miles, very close to the 62-mile-high Kármán line, which marks the boundary between earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

Regardless of what the experts thought, young Marvel Parsons was going to build such a rocket. He knew that Captain Nemo’s submarine
Nautilus
had seemed unbelievable when it first appeared in Verne’s
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
(1869), and similar vessels had since become a reality. Over the course of his short life Parsons would experiment, invent and, through hard work and a dash of genius, pioneer the solid-fuel rocketry that would take America into space, most notably in the solid rocket boosters that launched the Space Shuttle. He also invented jet-assisted take-off (JATO), which was a significant help to the American war effort, and was a co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet Corporation. In the opinion of his biographer John Carter, ‘everything today in the field of solid fuel rockets is essentially Parsons’ work, if slightly modified.’

But Parsons was a complicated individual. He signed a document stating that he was the Antichrist. He dedicated his spiritual life to summoning the Whore of Babylon, the lustful, beast-riding divinity prophesied in the Book of Revelation, in order that She could claim dominion over the entire world. Parsons was born on 2 October 1914, which happened to be the date that Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, claimed would usher in Armageddon.

He rejected the name Marvel, in favour of Jack or John, when he was still young. Marvel was the name of his absentee father, whom he had come to hate. Parsons wrote about his desire to ‘exteriorize [his] Oedipus complex’, and there are rumours that home movie footage existed of him having sex with his mother. And also with his mother’s dog. The only person Parsons would call ‘father’ was
Aleister Crowley, who he both idolised and supported with money earned from his career as a rocket scientist. Parsons would chant Crowley’s
Hymn to Pan
before rocket tests, slowly stamping along with the words:

Nowadays chanting black magic invocations before rocket tests is frowned upon, but it does add a certain something.

Parsons was recruited into the world of academic aeronautics research by the famed Hungarian physicist Theodore von Kármán, after whom the boundary between earth’s atmosphere and outer space was named. Von Kármán had a reputation for being willing to take on unlikely projects, and his colleagues at Caltech were happy to leave the ‘Buck Rogers stuff’ to him. Parsons had no formal college education, but von Kármán recognised his talent and intelligence and included him in a research group working on identifying more powerful rocket fuels. Naturally charming and handsome, Parsons had no difficulty moving among the engineers and experimenters of academia.

Parsons’s group soon earned the nickname the Suicide Squad, following a number of failed rocket-fuel experiments that caused safety concerns on the Caltech campus. In response they were moved to a few acres of land nearer the San Gabriel Mountains, just above the Devils Gate Dam. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is situated there to this day, and considers its official moment of founding to be the experiments performed by Parsons and the Suicide Squad on Hallowe’en 1936.

The approaching war brought a turnaround in the fortunes of the group, in terms of both financial support and the credibility of their field. The outbreak of war in Europe also coincided with Parsons’s discovery of Aleister Crowley, although he had long held an interest
in the darker side of the occult. He claimed that he first attempted to invoke Satan at the age of thirteen. After the war, when his technical reputation was assured, he sold his share in the Eurojet Corporation and dedicated himself to furthering his occult studies.

Rumours began to circulate about the ungodly activities occurring at his large house on Pasadena’s ‘millionaires’ row’. His home became a focus for both devotees of the occult and Los Angeles science fiction enthusiasts. His well-heeled neighbours were not happy when he began renting out rooms to ‘undesirables’, such as bohemians, artists or anarchists. Parsons had placed an advert in the local paper’s ‘rooms to let’ section which advised that prospective tenants ‘must not believe in God’. His bedroom was his main temple, where he regularly performed a Black Mass in black robes with a group of Crowley’s followers. One visitor recalled how ‘Two women in diaphanous gowns would dance around a pot of fire, surrounded by coffins topped with candles … All I could think at the time was if those robes caught on fire the whole house would go up like a tinderbox.’ Sexual magic and drugs play an important role in Thelemic ritual magic, due to their ability to create changes in consciousness. Parsons wrote a poem called ‘Oriflamme’, which began, ‘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 the brain.’

Parsons’s great occult project was to destroy the current world, which he viewed as patriarchal and corrupt, by unleashing an overpowering wave of dark female energy. To this end he embarked on a lengthy series of rituals aimed at manifesting the Biblical Whore of Babylon (or ‘Babalon’ as he preferred to name her). He was aided in this endeavour by the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, who would later found the Scientology organisation. Their relationship did not end well, and Hubbard eventually abandoned Parsons. He took with him Parsons’s lover and a large amount of his money, with which he bought a number of yachts. Parsons retaliated by declaring magical war and claimed to have summoned the sudden sea squall that almost sank Hubbard’s boat. This messy situation led to
a distinct cooling in Crowley’s opinion of the pair. Referring to Parsons and Hubbard in a letter to his colleague Karl Germer, Crowley wrote that ‘I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.’

Parsons believed that, exactly seven years after his Babalon Workings, Babalon herself would manifest and rule over this world. His prophecy included a proviso that this would only occur if he was still alive. But during the Babalon Workings, Hubbard had channelled a dreadful warning, one that left him ‘pale and sweaty’: ‘She [Babalon] is the flame of life, power of darkness, she destroys with a glance, she may take thy soul. She feeds upon the death of men. Beautiful – horrible … She shall absorb thee, and thou shalt become living flame before she incarnates.’

An explosion ripped apart Jack Parsons’s home on 17 June 1952. It could be heard nearly two miles away. Parsons was at the very heart of it. His right arm was never found, so must have been closest to the source of the explosion. Much of his right jaw was gone, his shoes were shredded by the blast and his remaining limbs were shattered. He was found alive by neighbours, in the rubble of the firestorm. Papers both technical and occult floated through the air. He died thirty-seven minutes later, and was still just thirty-seven years old. His last words were, ‘I wasn’t done.’ Fitting for an Antichrist perhaps – the opposite of Jesus’s ‘It is finished.’

Parsons, who had found work making explosives for Hollywood movies, had most likely made a careless mistake when working in his laboratory, where he stored a significant amount of chemicals and explosives. There have been a number of other theories for his death over the years, as you might expect given his links to military secrets and the world of the occult.

Parsons’s interest in both rockets and ritual magic might seem surprising today, when a career in rocket science is considered to be professional and respectable. But when Parsons set out on his path, they were both fantastical. Such was Parsons’s will and personality that he pursued them both regardless, in the long tradition of magically minded scientists such as Isaac Newton or the
sixteenth-century astronomer John Dee. He was concerned with summoning and controlling colossal amounts of explosive energy, both mental and chemical. Both were dangerous, and in both he could be reckless. If he didn’t have the demons that drove him towards the occult, it seems unlikely that he would have had such success in the field of rocket science. It was the same urge that propelled him down both paths.

In 1972 the International Astronomical Union named a crater on the moon ‘Parsons Crater’, to mark his pioneering work in the field of rocket science. It is perhaps apt that the crater that honours Marvel Whiteside Parsons is on the dark side of the moon.

In July 1943 a charming, handsome German aristocrat named Wernher von Braun was driven to Wolfsschanze, a secret bunker headquarters hidden deep in the woods outside Rastenberg in East Prussia. This was Hitler’s infamous ‘Wolf’s Lair’. Von Braun’s intention was to convince his Führer to support the production of a new rocket he had developed, the A-4.

Amidst the dark, grimy industry of the Second World War, A-4 rockets appeared to be technology from the future. Standing forty-six feet tall, these sleek, beautifully shaped rockets looked like illustrations from pulp science fiction. They had a range of two hundred miles and were decades ahead of anything the Russians or Americans were capable of building. The problem was that Hitler had previously dismissed the project because of a dream he once had. In that dream Hitler was convinced that no rocket would ever reach England, and for that reason he simply did not believe that the project was worthwhile.

By 1943 Hitler was pallid from living in bunkers away from sunlight. He looked much older and frailer than before the war, and the slight stoop as he walked made him look smaller. An army general who accompanied von Braun was shocked at the change in him. Yet as Hitler watched von Braun’s confident presentation and saw footage of successful A-4 test flights, a marked change came over him. ‘Why could I not believe in the success of your work? Europe
and the rest of the world will be too small to contain a war with such weapons. Humanity will not be able to endure it!’ he declared. Hitler took a gamble on von Braun’s work winning him the war, and redirected much needed resources to the rocket programme. The A-4 would be renamed the V-2, the ‘Vengeance Weapon’. Hitler wanted the rocket’s load to be increased from a 1-tonne to a 10-tonne warhead, and he wanted thousands of them to be mass-produced every month.