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Planetary News: Space People (2006)

Remembering James Van Allen

By Louis D. Friedman, Executive Director
August 10, 2006

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Celebrating Success
From left, William H. Pickering, James Van Allen, and Wernher von Braun -- the three men responsible for the success of Explorer 1, America's first satellite, launched January 31, 1958. Credit: NASA

James Van Allen, one of the pioneers of the Space Age, died this week at age 91. He will be remembered in the history books as the discoverer of the radiation bands that surround our planet, where charged particles from the Sun are trapped within Earth’s magnetosphere. Those regions are universally known as the Van Allen Belts.

With Van Allen as scientist, Werner Von Braun as rocket builder, and William Pickering as spacecraft builder, Explorer 1 became the U.S. first successful space mission, and that simple spacecraft’s detection of the Van Allen Belts is remembered as the first major scientific discovery in space. At that dawn of the Space Age, the nature of space exploration was already apparent: It always leads to unexpected discoveries about our universe and the processes that shape our environment.

I knew Van Allen well. We worked together to develop a Jupiter Orbiter mission, which eventually became Galileo. Besides being a great scientist, Van was a great man – unassuming and gracious, especially to a young engineer -- like me -- who liked to think he had all the answers (even when he didn’t.) He also was close to Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray, and when we founded The Planetary Society, he was among the very first to join our Advisory Council.

Van was such a scientist’s scientist that he didn’t immediately see the value of putting cameras on spacecraft just to take pictures. But when we were working on the Jupiter mission design, he showed me that he was a true explorer by becoming a strong advocate of the using the spacecraft’s tour among the moons to study both the magnetosphere and to image and study the satellites themselves. At that time, the great Galilean moons were barely specks in a telescope. It took Pioneer, Voyager, and Galileo -- all missions on which Van Allen was a leader -- to reveal them as the fascinating worlds we know today.

Van and I also had our disagreements. He never subscribed to the value of sending humans to explore space. But even this characterization may be unfair to him, for what he really was against was pretending that humans were conducting valuable and unique science on the space shuttle and space station, when so much of that science could have been done in more cost-effective ways.

I wish we had his powers of advocacy now in our campaign to Save Our Science -- even while The Planetary Society continues to support human spaceflight in the Vision for Space Exploration that could return us to the Moon and take us on to Mars.