CODEX Entry 3620: Aerojet facility
Jet Propulsions Laboratories (JPL) ran the Aerojet Facility and was founded by Jack Parsons in 1943. A rocket engineer and Thelemite occultist, the Aerojet Facility was selected to test his solid-fuel rocket propellant. Back in 1934, he had united with fellow ex-students Forman and Frank Malina to form a Rocket Research Group, funded by Theodore von Kármán. In 1939 they got funding to work on Jet-Assisted Take Off for the U.S. military. Their first design was tested in 1941, a small solid-fuel motor attached to the bottom of a plane. This shortened the takeoff distance by half, and the USAAF placed an experimental order. After the U.S. entered World War II, they founded Aerojet and JPL to develop and sell their technology. In just twenty years it grew into a 700-million-dollar a year business, with 34,000 staff, with a key role in the US defense sector. One of its testing facilities for solid fuel rockets was in the everglades south west of Miami. Buildings built around a deep silo which housed the largest solid-fuel rocket motor ever built. The rocket was tested three times between 1965 and 1967. Then NASA dropped the project, deciding to go with liquid-fuel rocket engines instead. The plant was closed in 1969, leaving the rocket behind, and is now a rusted overgrown warren of buildings. At other facilities, the company did design the Aerobee which was the first US-designed rocket to reach space and completed over 1,000 flights by 1985. Aerojet designed and built a thousand engines for the Titan rockets and Minuteman missiles. These engines were also used for Gemini’s manned flights and solar system exploration, including the Viking, Voyager, and Cassini missions. They also delivered propulsion systems for the US Navy’s submarine-launched Polaris missile. Later the company worked on the infra-red detectors for the Defense Support Program satellites and participated in the shuttle program.
Aerojet’s founder, Jack Parsons, was an ardent Marxist, as well as joining the California branch of English occultist Aleister Crowley’s Thelemite Ordo Templi Orientis. The group worshipped and communicated with the Goddess Babalon in heavily sexualized rituals. The Babalon Working was a twelve-day sex ritual borrowed from the Sacred Marriage ritual of the Festival of Zagmat. Where the Babylonian King would have sex with the High Priestess, renacting Marduk’s sexual acts with the Naditu (see Codex 1011). Crowley ordered that Parsons replace Wilfred Talbot Smith as its high priest in the months before the Aerojet Facility was founded and he ran the Lodge’s rituals from his mansion. Parsons was expelled from JPL and Aerojet in 1944 due to the infamous rituals of the cult Lodge. Parsons’ affair with his wife’s sister Sara, having performed the Babalon Workings with her, came to an end when Sara left him for fellow member L. Ron Hubbard, founder of scientology. He and Hubbard continued to beckon new ‘goddesses’ using Enochian magic. Enochian Magic was created, or reimagined by John Dee, Elizabeth I’s chief Egyptologist and occultist. One ‘victim’, the beautiful artist Marjorie Cameron, married Parsons after the twelve days of sexual rituals. Hubbard and Sara defrauded Parsons of his life savings, and he struggled to find work, briefly acting as a rocket consultant to Israel. Under McCarthyism, he was accused of espionage and left unable to work in rocketry. In 1952 Parsons died at the age of 37 in a home laboratory explosion. The police ruled it an accident, but many of Parsons colleagues suspected suicide or murder.