“The long-buried truth about the dawn of the Space Age: lies, spies, socialism, and sex magick.”
ESCAPE FROM EARTH is the untold story of the engineers, dreamers and rebels who started the American space programme. In particular, it is the story of Frank Malina, founder of what became Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the scientist who cracked the, as he called it, problem of escape from the Earth by rocket.
It’s a wild ride. Jack Parsons, Malina’s chemistry-expert research partner, was a bed-hopping occultist with delusions of grandeur. We get all the horrible details: drug parties and sex magic, cameos by Aleister Crowley and L Ron Hubbard, and an ill-fated attempt to start a mail-order religion.
Armed with hitherto unpublished letters, journals, and documents from the Malina family archives, Fraser MacDonald reveals what we didn’t know. Jack Parsons betrayed Frank Malina to the FBI, cooperating fully in their investigation of Malina for un-American activities. The Jet Propulsion Lab’s second director secretly denounced Frank as a Communist. Frank’s research group had close ties to the spy network of the infamous Rosenbergs – the only Americans executed during the Red Scare. This is a story of soaring ideals entangled in the most human of complications: infidelity and divorce, betrayal and treason.
Escape from Earth is available in hardcover (384 pages) and eBook. It is published in the UK through Profile Books, and in the US through PublicAffairs. (I prefer the eBook cover, top, myself.) You can preview the book at the publishers’ websites, as well as at Amazon. An excerpt has also been published at Literary Hub.
