James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles

377 Pages·2007·2.39 MB·English

by  Abigail Foerstner

James Van Allen

The First
James
Eight Billion
Miles
Van Allen
Abigail Foerstner
university of iowa press Iowa City
University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242
Copyright © 2007 by the University of Iowa Press
www.uiowapress.org
Printed in the United States of America
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Printed on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Foerstner, Abigail, 1949–
James Van Allen: The first eight billion miles / by Abigail Foerstner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-87745-999-6 (cloth)
isbn-10: 0-87745-999-1 (cloth)
1. Van Allen, James A. (James Alfred), 1914–2006. 2. Astrophysicists—
Iowa—Biography. I. Title.
qb36.v357f64 2007 2007008870
523.01092—dc22
[b]
07 08 09 10 11 c 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to
elsie foerstner
my aunt and inspiration

.
. Contents
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. Preface and Acknowledgments, ix
.
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. Introduction, xv
.
.
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. Abbreviations and Acronyms, xix
.
.
1. Frontier Roots, 1
.
.
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2. Heartland Boyhood, 16
.
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3. The Making of a Scientist, 35
.
.
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4. Physicists to the War Effort, 50
.
.
5. Enter Abigail Fithian Halsey, 67
.
.
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6. The Dawn of Space Exploration, 75
.
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7. The Mighty Little Aerobee, 93
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8. It’s a Rocket! It’s a Balloon! It’s a Rockoon!, 106
.
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9. Sputnikand the Space Race, 122
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.
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10. Countdown to Explorer I, 142
.
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11. Celebrity Scientist and the Birth of NASA, 161
.
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12.. Discovery of the Radiation Belts, 175
.
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13. Space Shield for the Cold War, 187
.
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14.. Space as a Cottage Industry, 200
.
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15. The Mariners, 213
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16.. Pioneers to the Outer Planets, 229
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17. Space Politics, 248
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18.. Journey to the Edge of the Solar System, 265
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. Notes, 277
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. Selected Bibliography, 295
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. Index, 301
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Preface and Acknowledgments
The corner of Jefferson and Dubuque Streets in Iowa City surely marks one of
the world’s epicenters for physics and metaphysics. Within a block, St. Mary’s
Catholic Church, the First United Methodist Church, the Congregational
United Church of Christ, and Gloria Dei Lutheran Church give voice to meta-
physics. At the intersection itself, Van Allen Hall anchors the University of
Iowa’s Department of Physics and Astronomy.
The cement walls of the seven-story physics building convey the quality of
a citadel. Step through the west entrance and the legacy of the building
becomes clear. Display cases in the hallway document astrophysicist James
Van Allen’s space missions and seminal models of cosmic ray detectors later
refined for America’s first satellites—detectors that discovered the Van Allen
radiation belts. To the uninitiated, the maze of circuitry stacked in the tubu-
lar detectors suggests an overzealous design for a flashlight. But scientists who
had to pick experiments to launch in a satellite knew Van Allen’s designs would
work. He had a reputation as a practical physicist who applied the lessons of
small-town Iowa ingenuity to outer space.
Finding Van Allen’s headquarters from the hallway was easy. Scientists, stu-
dents, friends, and reporters just took the elevator to the top floor and followed
the slight drift of pipe smoke through the open door across the hall. Only weeks
before his death, on August 9, 2006, Van Allen worked in the office beyond
this door every day, participating in the fields of space science he helped estab-
lish and fulfilling constant requests for interviews, articles, and forewords to
books. He loaded hand-programmed cards into a Hewlett-Packard 1972
c alculator/plotter to appraise findings from his own space missions in the light
of ever closer recent encounters other missions have made with the planets.
He remained an influential voice in the continuing crusade for more robotic
space probes to reach deeper into space.
At the front of the office, Van Allen kept his diaries, journals, bound copies
of papers he and his former students have written over sixty-five years, and
the latest photographs from space. But the columns of floor-to-ceiling book-
cases that led to the back of the room cut a path through space history. Here,
yellowing paper tapes documented data from instruments loaded in balloon-
launched rockets from the earliest days of space exploration. Here, bound vol-
umes of charts and graphs plotted a new map of the solar system, planet by
planet, and field logs dated back to the days of shooting reassembled German