James Van Allen, 91; Physicist Whose Work Helped Boost Space Exploration

James Van Allen, one of the pioneers of America’s space program who gave his name to the belts of radiation that encircle the Earth, died Wednesday. He was 91.

Van Allen died of heart failure at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City, said university spokesman Stephen Pradarelli.

The winner of numerous awards and proclamations, including the nation’s highest scientific award, the National Medal of Science, Van Allen helped blaze the trail into space for America in the period following the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957.

Not quite four months after Sputnik, America launched its first successful space mission, Explorer 1, which carried in its payload a small Geiger counter developed by Van Allen. The instrument detected two belts of intense radiation surrounding the Earth, a discovery that marked the birth of magnetospheric physics and made Van Allen a scientific celebrity.

The radiation belts were named for him. In 1959, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Two years later, he was named one of America’s top scientists.

“His discovery of the Van Allen belts was the first major scientific discovery of the Space Age,” said Ed Stone, the former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge.

“The discovery was unexpected, and that’s what made it so exciting. It set the tone for the further exploration of space by revealing how much there was to be discovered.”

Despite being on the ground floor of America’s space program, Van Allen was critical of the decision to use manned flights. He believed that robotic instruments could do everything that human astronauts could while avoiding the danger of exposing fragile living beings to the harsh environment of space.

“Man is a fabulous nuisance in space,” Van Allen said in 1959, shortly after the successful launch of Explorer 1, with which he was intimately involved. “He’s not worth all the costs of putting him up there and keeping him comfortable.”

Tributes poured in Wednesday for one of the last of America’s founding generation of space visionaries.

“James Van Allen was one of the greatest and most accomplished American space scientists of our time, and few researchers had such a wide range of expertise in so many scientific disciplines,” said NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin.

“NASA’s path of space exploration is far more advanced today because of Dr. Van Allen’s groundbreaking work.”

John Casani, who worked with Van Allen on the 1977 Galileo mission to Jupiter, recalled the unfailingly modest scientist as “almost a father figure -- a very kind, loving man.”

Casani credited Van Allen with developing Galileo’s innovative “dual-spin concept” that solved the problem of needing to keep some instruments, such as cameras, in fixed positions, while allowing others to rotate as they scanned for charged particles.

“I remember him with great respect and a great deal of fondness,” said Casani, the former chief engineer at JPL.

In Iowa, where Van Allen spent his career teaching and raising a family, Gov. Tom Vilsack said: “His passing is a sad day for science in America and the world.”

Van Allen was born in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, on Sept. 7, 1914, the son of a lawyer who taught his four children the benefits of hard work and staying busy. The lessons impressed young James, who though sickly as a child developed an early work ethic that would always impress colleagues as much as his simple decency did.

“His idea of a good time is to go into his labs and just work through the weekend,” a colleague said in the 1980s, according to the Des Moines Register.

A born tinkerer who felt driven to figure out how things work, Van Allen was valedictorian of his high school class. While an undergraduate at Iowa Wesleyan College, he helped prepare scientific equipment for the second Byrd expedition to the South Pole in 1934.

During World War II, he worked at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University on proximity detonators to increase the effectiveness of anti-aircraft fire from ships.

After the war, Van Allen returned to Johns Hopkins, directing a team conducting high-altitude experiments with V-2 rockets, before becoming head of the University of Iowa’s department of physics and astronomy in 1951. He used the school’s football field to launch rockets and “rockoons,” rockets taken aloft by balloons.

That work led to his discovery of electrons that were the force behind the nighttime light displays known as auroras.

Explorer 1 was a critical boost for the fledgling American space program, after the failure of a launch attempt in December 1957. It also inaugurated the space race that pitted Soviet and American scientists, and their stables of German expatriate scientists, against each other throughout the 1960s.

Although they were the public high point of his lengthy career, the Explorer 1 mission and its scientific discoveries were merely the first of many mysteries in space that Van Allen tackled. In 1973, he probed the radiation belts of Jupiter with the Pioneer 10 spacecraft. He discovered and surveyed the radiation belts of Saturn with Pioneer 11.

There was little question that he loved his work. “I believe that the exploration of space is the nearest approach to an intellectual renaissance that we have at the present juncture of history,” he told an interviewer in 1970, according to the Des Moines Register.

But as a scientist who enjoyed designing complex instruments to probe space, he was no fan of the manned space program, which he considered unnecessarily expensive and complicated.

Instruments, he said, were lighter and tougher, and made fewer demands for comfort.

Besides the Explorer, Pioneer and Galileo missions, Van Allen also worked on Voyager 1 and 2, as well as the Cassini mission to Saturn, which is presently unraveling the mysteries of Saturn’s giant moon Titan, with its smog-like atmosphere and hydrocarbon lakes.

He remained a classroom teacher into his seventies, retiring in 1985. In 1974, People magazine named him one of the top 10 college professors in the United States. In 1987, President Reagan presented him the nation’s top award for scientific achievement.

In 1994, Van Allen received the Gerard P. Kuiper Prize from the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society “in recognition of his many contributions to the field of planetary science, both through his investigations of planetary magnetospheres and through his advocacy of planetary exploration.”

The same year, he received a lifetime achievement award from NASA on his 80th birthday.

His widow, Abigail, said that even in retirement, her husband went to his office at the university nearly every day. Until the end, he was writing and publishing scientific papers.

“He was still as bright as a tack,” she said of her husband of 61 years. They met at the Applied Physics Laboratory when he was 31 and she 23. The couple had five children and seven grandchildren.

Abigail Van Allen said her husband seemed to be recovering well from surgery in May and was eager to get back on his feet.

“His strong motivation was to get back to his office,” she said.

He suddenly took a turn for the worse in recent days. Even then, he remained buoyant. “I’m oppressed, but not depressed,” she recalled him saying.

“Isn’t that cute?”

Abigail Van Allen said a memorial service is planned.