In the winter of 1946, two men from very different walks of life walked into California's Mojave Desert together, where one of them became convinced an extraordinary experiment they had been conducting had finally succeeded.
One of the men was pioneering rocket scientist Jack Parsons, a self-taught chemist who helped establish what would become NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and whose innovations in rocket propulsion would help lay the groundwork for the Space Race that would erupt in the years that followed. His unlikely companion was none other than L. Ron Hubbard, then a science fiction writer who had yet to compose the writings that would form the underpinnings of the Church of Scientology that he later established.
Despite Parsons' work with rockets and his companion Hubbard's fictional writings about them, their work together in the early months of 1946 had nothing to do with rocket propulsion, spacecraft, or other technological innovations that would eventually carry humans to space. Instead, Parsons and Hubbar...
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