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By this time, the sky scientist from Iowa had taken on a deceptive skill in threading his way through Washington's bureaucratic jungles. When the supply of captured V-2s was about to run out, Van Allen proposed and drew specifications for a cheaper rocket—the Aerobee—and headed the committee that talked the Government into getting it produced. Next, he got the Navy to provide him a ship from which he shot Aerobees at cosmic rays from the Magnetic Equator off Peru to the Gulf of Alaska.
Pedigreed Bull. In 1950 came an event that began small but was to affect the future of Van Allen and all his countrymen. In March, British Physicist Sydney Chapman dropped in on Van Allen, remarked that he would like to meet other scientists in the Washington area. Van Allen got on the phone, soon gathered eight or ten top scientists in the living room of his small brick house. "It was what you might call a pedigreed bull session," he says.
The talk turned to geophysics and the two "International Polar Years" that had enlisted the world's leading nations to study the Arctic and Antarctic regions in 1882 and 1932. Someone suggested that with the development of new tools such as rockets, radar and computers, the time was ripe for a worldwide geophysical year. The other men were enthusiastic, and their enthusiasm spread around the world from Washington.
The International Geophysical Year (1957-58) stimulated the U.S. Government to promise earth satellites as geophysical tools. The Soviet government countered by rushing its Sputniks into orbit. The race into space may be said to have started in Van Allen's living room that evening in 1950.
Almost simultaneously, the Applied Physics Laboratory tried to assign Van Allen to something more practical than cosmic rays—such as heading a program to develop a better proximity fuse. Van Allen was not interested. The State University of Iowa offered him a job as head of the physics department. He accepted.
Balloons over the Stadium. Back in Iowa with his wife and two young children, Van Allen was also back on a slim academic budget. With a tiny ($4,000) grant from the Research Corporation, he set students to launching cheap plastic balloons from the running track in the stadium. After V-2s and Aerobees, it was a sad comedown.
Then he remembered a remark made by Lieut. Commander Lee Lewis during an Aerobee firing off the coast of Peru. "Wouldn't it be easier," Lewis had asked, "to lift a rocket on a balloon above most of the atmosphere, and then fire it?" No one had ever tried it, but after a little figuring, Van Allen decided that the trick should work. He wangled small, cheap rockets through his friend Pickering at the Jet Propulsion Lab; a balloon-rocket combination to carry an 8-lb. payload of instruments 75 miles up was put together for a mere $750.
Van Allen's "Rockoons" could not be fired in Iowa for fear that the spent rockets would spike an lowan or his house. Turning his oldtime mesmerism on official Washington, Van Allen found that it still had not lost its effectiveness. The Coast Guard agreed to put him and his Rockoons aboard the icebreaker Eastwind bound for Greenland, where cosmic rays are deflected toward the Magnetic Pole by the earth's magnetic field.