Free Republic

Abigail and Dr. James Van Allen and his wife, Abigail, met “by accident” when she backed into his car at a stoplight in Baltimore. He scowled, but said nothing. When she ran into him again a few minutes later at the applied physics lab at Johns Hopkins University where they worked, she said, “Who do you think you are, throwing those dirty looks?” He called her the following Sunday to go bicycling. The Van Allens married on Oct. 13, 1945, in Southampton, Long Island. They lived right outside Washington, D.C., until 1951 when Van Allen accepted the position of head...

Now that Robert Park is in the winter of his life and James Van Allen is dead, an unlikely person named Charles Seife, not a scientist but rather a professor of journalism, has taken up the banner of the jihad to destroy NASA's human spaceflight program. In an article in Slate and a later post on his personal blog, Professor Seife compared the space agency to a Panda, cute but in danger of extinction. The reason, he suggests, NASA's "fixation" on human space flight. Like Van Allen, Park, and a slew of politicians before him, Seife would see NASA's human...

IOWA CITY, Iowa - Physicist James A. Van Allen, a leader in space exploration who discovered the radiation belts surrounding the earth that now bear his name, died Wednesday. He was 91. The University of Iowa, where he taught for years, announced the death in a statement on its Web site. Van Allen gained global attention in the late 1950s when instruments he designed and placed aboard the first U.S. satellite, Explorer I, discovered the bands of intense radiation that surround the earth. The bands later named in his honor and spawned a whole new field of research known as...