James Van Allen (1914 – 2006)
Space scientist who was instrumental in the early space program of the United States.
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I'm one of the most durable advocates for space exploration around.
As soon as we started looking at them, we saw the most remarkable situation. My first thought was, 'Great guns! Something's gone wrong with the apparatus!' But then we got later North American tapes and everything seemed normal again.
Apparently, something happens on the sun. It sends out a burst of gases. The reservoirs above our earth shake like a bowl of jelly. The radiation droozles out at the ends and makes the auroral displays at the North and South Poles.
I believe in scientific inquiry for its own sake. I think the history of science gives ample examples that pure investigation has enormous benefit. ... I can't tell you what this might be good for, but learning about nature is important. And lovely things turn up.
After a vast research program, which depended very heavily upon the use of a number of highspeed computers, I am pleased to offer you the result: "Space is that in which everything else is." In other words, "Space is the hole that we are in."
...Outer space, once a region of spirited international competition, is also a region of international cooperation. I realized this as early as 1959, when I attended an international conference on cosmic radiation in Moscow. At this conference, there were many differing views and differing methods of attack, but the problems were common ones to all of us and a unity of basic purpose was everywhere evident.
Certainly one of the most enthralling things about human life is the recognition that we live in what, for practical purposes, is a universe without bounds.
It was like going hunting for rabbits and encountering an elephant instead.
Many of the papers presented there depended in an essential way upon others which had appeared originally in as many as three or four different languages. Surely science is one of the universal human activities.
I was a kind of a one-man army. I could solder circuits together, I could turn out things on the lathe, I could work with rockets and balloons. I'm a kind of a hybrid between an engineer and a physicist and astronomer."
All this is very good in theory, but in practice, you take a piece of iron, wind a wire around it, then plug the wire in. The core gets hot, the wires smoke, and the fuse blows. So you see, there are practical limitations to theory.
A man is a fabulous nuisance in space right now. He's not worth all the cost of putting him up there and keeping him comfortable and working.
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