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A lonely misfit born into a wealthy Pasadena family, as a boy Parsons read science fiction and launched rockets in his backyard. By his early twenties, he was a leader of Caltech's "Suicide Squad," the motley band of young enthusiasts who founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But his visionary imagination also led him into the occult community thriving in 1930s Los Angeles, and when fantasy's pull became stronger than reality, he lost both his work...
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"Today, everyone is familiar with Neil Armstrong's famous words as he first set foot on the moon: 'one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.' He made it look easy, but America's journey to the moon was anything but simple. In 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite, into orbit, America had barely crossed the starting line of the great Space Race. Later that year, our first attempt was such a failure that...