Who Is Jack Parsons?
There wasn’t much information available on Parsons, so Pendle dug deeper and did some extensive research. He found out that Parsons was actually one of the founders of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, at Caltech, where the first rocket experiments took place in 1936.
Pendle’s curiosity about Parsons continued to grow, and so did the roadblocks he encountered. More than 70 years after those first experiments were conducted, Parsons’ involvement was still a sore topic for the JPL. “When I tried to interview people [there], they were just not interested,” Pendle explained. He added that their general view on the subject was, “He’s not the sort of person we want to talk about.”