Pasadena, late 1930s. Young self-taught chemist Jack Parsons launches homemade rockets in the Arroyo Seco canyon near Los Angeles. At night, he immerses himself in the world of esotericism and soon begins corresponding with English occultist Aleister Crowley.
Decades later, Parsons' developments will help propel humanity into space. He will become one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and his contributions to rocketry will lay the groundwork for the American space program. A crater on the far side of the Moon will be named in his honor.
Ideas that change the world are almost always born on the fringes—among people whom contemporaries consider eccentric. We explore how heresy becomes the norm and why pioneers often remain in the shadows of the revolutions they create.
A Laboratory on the Edge
States and corporations are invested in maintaining the order that sustains them. Experimentation is a risk without the promise of immediate reward. Thus, radical innovation rarely emerges where power and capital are concentrated.
A small community of like-minded individuals lacks the reputation that could be jeopardized and has no authority to answer to in case of failure. Instead, they have the freedom to try things that are deemed "crazy." The periphery becomes a laboratory for the future simply because it can afford to make mistakes.
Jack Parsons is almost a caricature of such an outsider. Born in Los Angeles in 1914, he was an avid reader of science fiction from a young age—ranging from Jules Verne to Amazing Stories magazine. He was expelled from military academy for an explosion in the restroom. The Great Depression took a toll on his family finances: Parsons worked at the Hercules powder plant, dropped out of college due to lack of funds, and never obtained a degree.
His interest in rockets began in childhood. He started his first experiments in 1928 with his school friend Ed Forman, and in 1934, Caltech graduate student Frank Malina joined them. Under the guidance of Theodore von Karman, the trio took rocket development seriously. Most scientists of the time considered discussions of space travel to be fantasy, and the group was nicknamed the "suicide squad" due to a series of dangerous experiments and accidents.
"Suicide Squad". Left to right: Rudolf Schott, Amo Smith, Frank Malina, Ed Forman, Jack Parsons. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Parsons' main invention was composite solid fuel: it could be cast into the desired shape and mass-produced. This technology is the precursor to the solid rocket motors of the Minuteman missile and the shuttle's solid rocket boosters. In 1943, the "suicide squad" evolved into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the year before, Parsons co-founded Aerojet—one of the pillars of the U.S. military space industry.
According to publisher and counterculture historian Richard Metzger, Wernher von Braun once suggested that Parsons should be more accurately called the "father of rocketry."
A Double-Edged Sword
By day, Parsons was an engineer. By night, he was an occultist. He led the California chapter of the Ordo Templi Orientis and practiced Thelema, Crowley's doctrine.
In 1946, Parsons wrote an essay titled "Freedom Is a Two-Edged Sword", published in a collection of the same name in 1989, 37 years after his death. This manifesto advocates for individual freedom against any repressive authority, whether it be the state, corporations, or the church.
For Parsons, freedom is a double-edged sword: one edge represents personal liberty, while the other signifies responsibility. He was particularly concerned about the erosion of privacy. In a 1950 preface, he lamented the "loyalty oaths," security checks, and how the U.S. Senate was turning private life into a mockery. Science, which promised to save the world, had been put in a straitjacket, and its language reduced to one word—"security."
He placed his last hope in the "creative minority."
"Today's ignorance and indifference are staggering. All that is best in our civilization and culture has been created by a few individuals capable of independent thought and action. The rest merely follow reluctantly. When the majority is deprived of freedom, barbarism appears on the horizon. But when the creative minority renounces freedom, the Dark Ages ensue," warned Parsons.
Surveillance, vanishing privacy, reliance on a handful of dissenters. Half a century later, these ideas would become the guiding principles of a movement that would give birth to Bitcoin.
Crypto Anarchists Write Code
The crypto anarchists of the 1990s became almost a literal embodiment of Parsons' "creative minority." In 1992, mathematician Eric Hughes, engineer Timothy May, and programmer John Gilmore founded a mailing list of the same name, and a year later, Hughes published the "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" with the line "crypto anarchists write code." Where Parsons relied on the sword of freedom, they depended on strong encryption. This environment gave rise to Bitcoin.
In October 2008, an anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published the white paper for the first cryptocurrency, and in January 2009, mined the genesis block with a headline embedded from The Times about a new bank rescue. In its early years, the project's fate was determined by a handful of anonymous individuals on forums, and "state-free money" seemed like a toy for geeks. But in a decade and a half, it transformed into a trading asset: in January 2024, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which had rejected such applications for ten years, approved 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs at once.
The revolution concludes when its ideas become part of a new order. The free internet has become entangled with platform monopolies, open code has been integrated into corporate development, and Bitcoin has secured its place among Wall Street's favorite assets. Artificial intelligence is following the same path. Not long ago, it was a niche research area on the fringes of academia, having survived several "winters". Today, it has ignited a race with trillion-dollar stakes.
Out of Format
Pioneers rarely get to see what their ideas evolve into.
During the Cold War, Parsons was sidelined from classified projects. Declassified FBI documents revealed that the main reason was his connections with Marxists at Caltech, while his occultism became a convenient excuse. His career collapsed. Parsons scraped by with odd jobs: working at a gas station and making pyrotechnics for Hollywood shoots.
On June 17, 1952, Parsons died at the age of 37 in an explosion in his home laboratory. On the same day, his mother, upon learning of his death, took a fatal dose of barbiturates. Initial newspaper reports paid tribute to the rocket scientist, but within a couple of days, the press inflated a mystical sensation. The LA Mirror's headline read: "Murdered Scientist—Priest of the Black Magic Cult."
The industry preferred to forget its inconvenient founder. Space historian Roger Lonius noted that the Caltech team is far less known than von Braun's team, despite having a comparable contribution. Von Karman, in a letter to Malina, ranked Parsons first among those most important to modern rocketry and the U.S. space program. Among engineers, the abbreviation JPL was informally interpreted as Jack Parsons Lives—"Jack Parsons lives."
Biographer George Pendle explained Parsons' low public status as a cultural stigma surrounding occultism: like many scientific rebels, he was cast aside as soon as he had served his purpose.
By the end of the 20th century, his memory was preserved mainly in the name of a crater on the far side of the Moon, which was named after him in 1972.
The Survivor's Fallacy
From Parsons' story, one can easily draw an overly broad conclusion: since the future is born on the periphery, any persecuted idea is valid. But for every idea that changes the world, there are hundreds and thousands of failures. Alchemists never learned to turn lead into gold, inventors of perpetual motion machines could not defy the laws of physics, and phrenology remains a historical curiosity.
A similar situation occurred in the crypto industry. Dozens of projects promised to revolutionize the market, raised vast sums of money, and disappeared after a few years. One of the most notable examples was EOS: in 2018, the project raised over $4 billion but never became the "Ethereum killer" its supporters claimed it would be. Many have vanished without a trace, as ForkLog demonstrated in a separate analysis.
The success of an idea is determined by whether the technology works, whether it solves a real problem, and whether someone is willing to pay for its implementation. Being on the periphery allows for experimentation, but it does not guarantee success.
If the cycle is universal, it is worth applying it to the present. Today, several periphery ideas are vying for attention: neurointerfaces, decentralized science (DeSci), network states. The most telling candidate is the movement for open AI, with its heroes and a common enemy in the form of closed corporate labs. In terms of social mechanics, this is almost literally the crypto community of a decade ago.
History does not provide ready-made forecasts, but it allows us to recognize recurring patterns. What today appears to be a ridiculous sect of geeks may tomorrow become an industry with government strategies and trillion-dollar budgets.