Page 178 - Lunacy and the Age of Deception

after challenging corruption in the force. When Kynette was convicted largely on Parsons'
testimony, which included his forensic reconstruction of the car bomb and its explosion, his identity
as an expert scientist in the public eye was established despite his lack of a university education.
[Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer)]

Jack Parsons Holding Model of Bomb Used by Police Officer

Parsons and his team struggled along until they received a contract with the National Academy of
Sciences Committee on Army Air Corps Research to develop a Jet Assisted Take Off (JATO) system
to allow military planes to take off from short air strips. By late 1944, the military was placing orders
for 20,000 units per month.

The First Jet Assisted Take Off

Due to rockets having a reputation as being something from science fiction, and being viewed as
fanciful play toys of dreamers by many academics and professionals of the day, the group avoided
using the word “rocket” in their projects. Technically, this was a “rocket assisted take-off,” but the
word jet was considered less controversial. It was this stigma against the word “rocket” that
influenced the group’s decision to call themselves the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There was,
however, a growing public interest in rockets. This was demonstrated when the August 1940 cover
of the magazine Popular Mechanics featured an image of a rocket and an inside story of the rocket
development work of Jack Parsons and Edward Forman.