Caltech and the Rocket Gang: Science at the Edge

In the late nineteen thirties, a group of Caltech graduate students began conducting amateur rocket experiments in the Arroyo Seco riverbed, the dry wash that runs along the western edge of campus. The Caltech administration found this embarrassing. Rockets were considered science fiction.

The ringleader was a man named John Whiteside Parsons, who went by Jack. Parsons was an extraordinary natural engineer, almost entirely self-taught. He was also a devoted follower of Aleister Crowley's occult order, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and conducted ritual ceremonies at his Pasadena mansion on Orange Grove Boulevard. The FBI opened a file on him.

The group ran their first rocket experiments in the Arroyo Seco in nineteen thirty-six. By nineteen forty-three, the program had formally organized as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL has managed every American planetary mission since the beginning of the space program, including every Mars lander, every outer solar system probe, and the Voyager spacecraft that are now, as you listen to this, outside the solar system.

Jack Parsons died in an explosion in his home laboratory in Pasadena in June nineteen fifty-two. He was thirty-seven years old. The Arroyo Seco riverbed where the group ran their first tests is now the Rose Bowl parking lot. A small historical marker acknowledges what happened there. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is three miles up the road.