Science: Reach into Space

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During recurring times of crisis, he may reduce his lunch to an apple or skip it altogether, but he still finds time to fly kites with his four children ("a little high-altitude research," he calls it), likes to work in his basement workshop. His most recent achievement: a model covered wagon, big enough to hold his nine-year-old daughter and friends. For the brilliant assistants and students who have gathered around him, he has full appreciation. "I am a sort of scoutmaster around here," he says mildly.

Among Van Allen's immediate interests is a 20-lb. satellite scheduled for launching next fall. If all goes well, it will settle into a slim, elliptical orbit, soaring out six earth radii (24.000 miles) at apogee. It should stay up for hundreds of years, and it will have solar batteries to keep its radio voices alive for a long time. Its duty will be to report continuously on the radiation belt, study how it is affected by sunspots and other solar eruptions. Its fluctuations may have important effects on the earth's weather.

Next: Venus. Like most other scientists, Van Allen is in no hurry to put a man into space. "A man is a fabulous nuisance in space right now," he says. "He's not worth all the cost of putting him up there and keeping him comfortable and working." Instruments are lighter, tougher and less demanding, are sensitive to many things that human senses ignore. They already have memories (tape recorders), and they can carry computers that will permit them to make judgments. An instrument-manned Venus probe should be able to make observations and adjust its course by firing small rockets when it nears its goal. Perhaps it will round Venus and then put itself into a back-to-earth trajectory.

Such a vehicle would have important military connotations. But James Van Allen, a pure scientist turned spaceman, sees such projects in simpler terms. Says he: "The satellite is a natural extension of rockets, which are natural extensions of planes and balloons, which are natural extensions of man's climbing trees and mountains in order to get up higher and thus have a better view."