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Orange-Juice Victory. The first balloon rose properly to 70,000 ft., but the rocket hanging under it did not fire. The second Rockoon behaved in the same maddening way. On the theory that extreme cold at high altitude might have stopped the clockwork supposed to ignite the rockets, Van Allen heated cans of orange juice, snuggled them into the third Rockoon's gondola, and wrapped the whole business in insulation. The rocket fired.
In 1953, Van Allen was temporarily diverted from Rockoons to a project at Princeton University to develop thermonuclear power. But his Iowa graduate students carried on the Rockoon firings off the coast of Newfoundland. One day the students put in an excited call to Van Allen in Princeton. The cosmic rays near Newfoundland, the students reported, seemed to rise to incredibly high intensity above 30 miles.
Obviously, concluded Van Allen, "there was something wild and woolly going on." The aurora borealis is most intense at latitudes north of Newfoundland. It was believed to be caused by charged particles of some sort raining down from space and concentrated around the Magnetic North Pole by the earth's magnetic field. Though Van Allen could not guess it then, the "cosmic rays" detected by his Rockoons were directly related to the northern lights, and were really a fringe of the worldwide radiation belt that he was to discover five years later.
Satellites Next. Rockoons had carried him as high as they could go. Van Allen began to take an interest in satellites. Since his White Sands days, he had kept an eye on U.S. rocketry. His association with the Navy had been long and pleasant, but he became an outspoken advocate of the Army's Jupiter-C, whose high-speed stages had been designed by Pickering's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "I made rather a pest of myself around Washington about Jupiter." he admits. But the Pentagon shunted Jupiter aside in favor of the Navy's Vanguard.
Despite his candid partisanship, Van Allen's status as the best instrumentator of space was so indisputable by this time that he found himself commissioned to provide Vanguard's instrumentation. He dutifully set to work. But he took the precaution of finding out just what the Army had planned for its banned Explorer I satellite. The Army informed him that it had in mind a cylinder 6 in. in diameter. By no coincidence at all, the instrument package Van Allen produced for the 21-in. Vanguard sphere proved to be cylindrical, and just 5½ in. in diameter.
Actual production was in the hands of husky young (31) George Ludwig, a graduate student who has proved himself a mechanical genius in the painstaking new art of space instrumentation. Each ounce counts, because it costs many thousands of dollars to put each ounce into orbit. The tiny, buglike components must stand enormous g forces, vibration and spin, survive violent changes of temperature.
Ludwig sets up a rough, breadboard model of the circuitry with real transistors, resistors and other components. When the circuits check out, the components are mounted on plastic disks. A typical package may contain several hundred diodes, transistors and resistors. All open space among the spidery components is usually filled with foamed plastic. Then the whole apparatus is dropped, shaken, bounced, heated and cooled.