James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles

I had Van Allen as a professor for General Astronomy in 70s. He was soft-spoken. He always had a friendly smile. He wore a lab coat so that he wouldn't get chalk dust on his suit. His freshman class was one of the best attended classes on campus. I didn't realize how good the class was at the time. He was not a dynamic speaker, but he was interesting. The exercises and experiments were great. He made science fun and interesting. He was voted by People's magazine that year to be one of the best professors in the United States. What the book does is brings out what a very decent, very nice, very intelligent, very shrewd, extremely diligent and persistent guy can do in science. It wasn't by luck that one of Van Allen's experiments was on the first satellite put up by the US. There were basically two factions in the United States who were building rockets at that time. Van Allen made sure his experiment would fit either rocket. Van Allen was persistent. Once he earned his rep, he wielded his niceness and reputation like a tool to get his agenda done. He needed to do that because Apollo was taking over the space program and unmanned projects were falling by the wayside. Without Van Allen our knowledge of the planets and the solarsphere would be much poorer. Van Allen is the quintessential Iowan: nice and hard working. The book writing style was okay. Some sections were dry. The section on the politics of getting the first satellite launched went on for pages. Another problem is a slight lack of drama. Van Allen was so successful at what he did because he planned so well. There was no failure from which to recover. Another problem was chronology. Sometimes the author followed the track of experiment through a decade and then jumped back. It was hard to keep with the flow some times. She used month and day for the date reference. With these experiments that went on for years, adding the year sometimes would have helped. In the later years, I wished she spent more time on his abilities as a teacher, mentor and administrator. I know it was difficult to keep notched physicists in Iowa. She does a good job of adding humorous little stories along the way. Overall, the book is fascinating. The story of the his time in the navy, the rockoons and the experiments were stories I heard alluded too, but never in such good detail. The man is fascinating. Good guys sometimes do finish first. Anyone who is interested in the space program, the history of planetary physics, or even the state of Iowa, should read this book.

It was good timing for this book to be published near the 50th anniversary of the launching of Sputnik. It was Sputnik and the resulting American inferiority complex that made James Van Allen an instant, Time-cover celebrity. Van Allen was the physicist behind Explorer 1, America's first spacecraft, which discovered the Van Allen radiation belts. Of course it may be a measure of how distorted our perceptions were that even a radiation belt could become a symbol of national pride. To this day the only image that the public has of James Van Allen may be one photo of him and Wernher von Braun triumphantly holding up a model of Explorer 1 as if it was a football. This book offers a wider historical perspective on James Van Allen and his scientific accomplishments. It shows him to be a quintessential Iowan, a friendly and modest man. It shows his Explorer 1 fame to be one chapter of a long and productive career as a pioneering astrophysicist, in the first generation of scientists to have use of the tools of the space age. Van Allen spent decades building satellites and instruments for spacecraft, most notably the Pioneers that were the first spacecraft to visit Jupiter and Saturn. The greatest value of this book is that it adds to a seriously underpopulated shelf of books about 20th-century astronomers. It's almost a scandal how many important 20th-century astronomers have never had biographies written about them. Many of the biographies that do exist were written by fellow scientists who had little sense of storytelling or interpreting science. While there are plenty of biographies of space pioneers, most of them are astronauts and rocket builders. The scientists behind the space missions are much less visible. Fortunately the University of Iowa has respect for both physics and storytelling.

Ask young people today who James A. Van Allen was, and they probably don't even know that he was a discoverer of the Van Allen Radiation Belts surrounding our earth, and was the guiding force behind the rocket and saellite instrument packages that have explored Earth's near environment and later, our solar system and beyond. But his story far is more than that. From his humble beginnings in a small town in Iowa to international acclaim his story is that of a scientist whose motto was "It's a good day when you learn somemthing new." I was one of his physics advisees during the 1950s at the University of Iowa, and one of his teaching and research assistants. I remember him to be as good a role model as any physics student could want. He had not a trace of ego, was always supportive of students and diplomatinc in negotiating the minefields of his dealings with government agencies, as required for sustaining his research goals. Under the pressure of cold war politics and launch deadlines, he seemed to be an island of calm. His office door was always open, where he'd be found smoking his tradmark pipe (burning walnut-scented tobacco). Perhaps that pipe was a calming influence. When reminded of health effects of smoking, he replied that he had never heard of a pipe smoker who was convicted of murder. This excelent, thorough, biography draws together a wealth of detail from Van Allen's notebooks, interviews with his associates, and media accounts to tell his story in an engaging manner, yet, I can attest, one that is true to the facts and details. We learn of his early work in developing proximity fuses during the WWII, which greatly increased the effectiveness of naval guns, his early "shoestring budget" high altitude studies of cosmic rays and the aurorae using military surplus rockets and instrumentation built by students at the University of Iowa. Throughought his research he emphasized getting the job done in the most direct and cost effective way. It will probably surprise most readers to learn that the payloads of Explorer I, IV and subsequent satellites and space probes were designed, built and tested by students working at minimum wage in the sub basement of the physics building, with no security. And all the data from them was analyzed by a small army of students (grateful for employment and experience) using mechanical calculators, graph paper, and slide rules. Many of these students went on to research jobs in the space program. He was an outspoken champion of robotic-instrumented space missions, considering manned spaceflight a collosal waste of money with little return on the investment. The results of the past 50 years, in my opinion, justify that position, when we compare the wealth of information instrumented space probes have yielded about the earth, solar system and (thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope) the rest of the universe. While the maned space programs have yielded--hardly anything of scientific value. The author of this boo