Fathers of Tuzemun - ForkLog

# Fathers of Tzemuuna

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 humanity reach space. He will become one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and his contribution to rocket engineering will form the basis of the American space program. A crater on the far side of the Moon will be named after him.

Ideas that change the world are almost always born on the fringes — among people considered odd by their contemporaries. We explore how heresy turns into norm and why pioneers often remain in the shadow of the revolutions they create.

Laboratory on the Edge

States and corporations are interested in maintaining the order that feeds them. An experiment is a risk without promise of immediate benefit. Therefore, radical novelty rarely arises where power and capital are concentrated.

A small community of like-minded individuals has no reputation to fear losing, and no bosses to be ashamed of failing before. But they have the freedom to try obviously “mad” things. The outskirts become a laboratory of the future simply because they can afford to make mistakes.

Jack Parsons is almost a caricature archetype of such an outsider. Born in Los Angeles in 1914, he was fascinated with science fiction from childhood — from Jules Verne to Amazing Stories magazine. He was expelled from military academy for an explosion in the bathroom. The Great Depression strained his family finances: Parsons worked at the Hercules powder plant, dropped out of college due to lack of money, and never received higher education.

His interest in rockets appeared early. His first experiments began in 1928 with his school friend Ed Forman, and in 1934, they were joined by Caltech graduate student Frank Malina. Under the guidance of Theodore von Kármán, the trio seriously engaged in rocket development. Most scientists of that time considered talks of space travel to be science fiction, and a series of dangerous experiments and accidents earned the group the nickname “suicide squad.”

“Suicide Squad.” From 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 underpins the solid rocket motors of the Minuteman missile and the shuttle’s side boosters. From the “suicide squad,” in 1943, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory grew, and a year earlier, Parsons co-founded Aerojet — one of the pillars of the US military-industrial complex.

According to the publisher and counterculture historian Richard Metzger, Werner von Braun once said that it would be more correct to call Parsons the “father of rocketry.”

A Double-Edged Sword

By day, Parsons was an engineer. By night, an occultist. He led the California chapter of the Ordo Templi Orientis and practiced Thelema, Crowley’s teachings.

In 1946, Parsons wrote an essay titled “Freedom — a Double-Edged Sword,” published only in the 1989 collection of the same name, 37 years after his death. It’s a manifesto defending individual freedom against any repressive authority — whether state, corporation, or church.

For Parsons, freedom was a double-edged sword: on one side personal liberty, on the other responsibility. He was particularly troubled by the erosion of privacy. In the 1950 preface, he bitterly wrote about “loyalty oaths,” background checks, and how the US Senate was turning private life into a mockery. Science, which promised to save the world, he said, was put into a straitjacket, and its language was reduced to one word — “security.”

He placed his last hope in the “creative minority.”

“Today’s ignorance and apathy are astonishing. All the best in our civilization and culture has been created by a few people capable of independent thought and action. The rest follow them reluctantly. When the majority loses its freedom, barbarism appears on the horizon. But when the creative minority rejects freedom, dark ages follow,” — Parsons warned.

Surveillance, disappearing privacy, reliance on a handful of dissenters. Half a century later, these ideas will become the credo of the movement that gave the world Bitcoin.

Crypto-Punks Write Code

The 1990s crypto-punks became almost a literal embodiment of Parsons’ “creative minority.” In 1992, mathematician Eric Hughes, engineer Timothy May, and programmer John Gilmore founded the eponymous mailing list, and a year later Hughes published the “Crypto-Punk Manifesto” with the line “crypto-punks write code.” Where Parsons relied on the sword of freedom, they relied on strong encryption. From this environment, Bitcoin grew.

In October 2008, anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published the white paper of the first cryptocurrency, and in January 2009 mined the genesis block with a headline from The Times about a new rescue for banks. In the early years, the project’s fate was decided by a handful of anonymous forum users, and “money without a state” seemed like a toy for geeks. But over a decade and a half, it transformed into a traded asset: in January 2024, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which had rejected such applications for ten years, approved 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs.

The revolution concludes when its ideas become part of a new order. The free internet is now dominated by platform monopolies, open source code is embedded in corporate development, and Bitcoin has taken its place among Wall Street’s favorite assets. The same path is being followed by artificial intelligence. Not long ago, it was a niche research area on the fringes of academia, having gone through several “winters.” Today, a race with trillion-dollar stakes is underway within it.

Non-Format

Pioneers rarely see what their ideas turn into.

During the Cold War, Parsons was barred from classified work. Declassified FBI documents revealed that the main reason was his connections with Marxists at Caltech, with occultism becoming a convenient pretext. His career collapsed. Parsons eked out a living doing odd jobs: working at a gas station and making pyrotechnics for Hollywood productions.

On June 17, 1952, Parsons died at age 37 in an explosion in his home laboratory. On the same day, his mother, upon hearing the news, took a lethal dose of barbiturates. The first newspaper reports paid tribute to the rocket scientist, but within days, the press spun a mystical sensation. The headline of the LA Mirror read: “Killed scientist — priest of the black magic cult.”

The industry preferred to forget its inconvenient founder. Space historian Roger Launius noted that the Caltech team is much less known than von Braun’s team, although their contributions are comparable. Von Kármán, in a letter to Malina, listed Parsons as the first among those most important for modern rocketry and the US space program. Among engineers, the abbreviation JPL was slang for Jack Parsons Lives — “Jack Parsons is alive.”

Biographer George Pendle explained Parsons’ low public profile by the cultural stigma surrounding occultism: like many scientific rebels, he was discarded as soon as he had served his purpose.

By the end of the 20th century, his memory was mainly preserved in the name of a crater on the Moon’s far side, named after him in 1972.

The Survivor’s Fallacy

It’s easy to draw a broad conclusion from Parsons’ story: since the future is born on the fringes, any persecuted idea has a right to exist. But for every idea that changes the world, there are hundreds or thousands of failures. Alchemists never learned to turn lead into gold, inventors of perpetual motion couldn’t cheat the laws of physics, and phrenology remained a historical curiosity.

The same was roughly true in the crypto industry. Dozens of projects promised to revolutionize the market, raised huge sums, and disappeared after a few years. One of the most famous examples was EOS: in 2018, the project attracted over $4 billion but never became the “Ethereum killer” its supporters claimed. Many others vanished without a trace, as ForkLog’s separate analysis showed.

The success of an idea depends on whether the technology works, whether it solves a real problem, and whether someone is willing to pay for its implementation. Being on the periphery offers freedom to experiment but does not guarantee success in itself.

If the cycle is universal, it’s worth applying to the present. Today, several fringes claim the role of peripheral ideas: neural interfaces, decentralized science (DeSci), network states. The most illustrative candidate is the open AI movement with its heroes and a common enemy in the form of closed corporate labs. In social mechanics, it’s almost literally a crypto-community from a decade ago.

History offers no ready-made forecasts but allows recognizing recurring plots. What today seems like a ridiculous sect of geeks might tomorrow become an industry with government strategies and trillion-dollar budgets.