Opening Space Research: Dreams, Technology, and Scientific Discovery

Opening Space Research: Dreams, Technology, and Scientific Discovery, George H. Ludwig American Geophysical Union, Washington, DC, 2011. $60.00 (478 pp.). ISBN 978-0-87590-733-8

Fifty years ago, I uprooted George Ludwig and his family from Iowa. I had recruited him to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, integrating the Geiger–Müller cosmic-ray detector into the first Explorer satellites. Ludwig was a key participant in early US Earth satellite and space exploration efforts. He was involved in the development of the cosmic-ray research program at the State University of Iowa (SUI, now better known as the University of Iowa), where he was a PhD student under James Van Allen and later became a full-time researcher. He kept detailed logs and journals of all his research activities at SUI and at JPL; he was probably influenced in that by Van Allen, who had a similar practice.

Those personal journals form the basis for Opening Space Research: Dreams, Technology, and Scientific Discovery, a detailed, informative, personal, and entertaining narrative of Ludwig’s professional development and involvement in the space program. The chronology and some details of the early unmanned space program found in this book do not exist elsewhere. The text is semitechnical, with 500 endnotes and references, a directory of 395 names cited, and a comprehensive bibliography of 84 works for further reading—these are available to the casual follower of early space-exploration history.

Opening Space Research highlights the development of SUI’s cosmic-ray research program. Ludwig traces the history of instrumental and experimental technology in the field, starting with the observation of cosmic rays with balloon-launched detectors and radio-telemetry equipment. Researchers subsequently gained higher altitudes by attaching a small rocket to a balloon and igniting the rocket in the upper atmosphere. That low-budget technology, called the “rockoon,” eventually led to the cosmic-ray-detector satellite instrument.

The central focus of the book is on Ludwig’s role in designing and integrating the instrument that discovered the Van Allen radiation belts; it flew aboard Explorer 1, the first Earth satellite launched by a noncommunist state. The cold war, interservice military rivalries, and other political activity took place during the 1950s, the era in which the satellite was launched. Among the many fine books that have been written about that time period are Walter McDougall’s The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) and Clayton Koppes’s JPL and the American Space Program: A History of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Yale University Press, 1982). Ludwig’s account offers a novel first-person perspective.

Ludwig spends several chapters describing the design of the satellite flight hardware, first at SUI and then at JPL. He warns readers that the discussion may get tedious and gives them permission to skip ahead. But for anyone who has been involved in the design and development process, Ludwig’s detailed account is an excellent manual on how to work out difficulties to produce an instrument—and particularly valuable if an instrument needing repair is inaccessible. The author also discusses the second generation of satellite instruments and how a cadre of early investigators branched out to different institutions to furnish the flight instruments and to analyze the data. That was after 1958, when NASA was formed, and after the development of other new laboratories and centers, such as NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The last portion of the book contains an insider’s view of the examination of the Explorer 1 and Explorer 3 data; cosmic-ray researchers spotted anomalies in the particle-counting results and realized that something strange was happening. That “something” was detector saturation by unexpectedly high radiation—the Van Allen belts. It took several weeks and several sets of data from the satellites to confirm what was happening. Ludwig relates how the public announcement of the radiation belts occurred and follows up with inside details of the Explorer 4 results, particularly the measuring of the 1958 Operation Argus high-altitude nuclear blasts, which loaded more particles into the radiation belts.

Among the book’s nontechnical gems are Ludwig’s short personal histories of many of his SUI research colleagues. He also recounts instances of his attendance at key meetings where crucial decisions were made. On the evening of 4 October 1957, he was present at the Soviet Union’s embassy in Washington, DC, when the electrifying news of the Sputnik launch was shouted out. He was a graduate student then, but attended as the designated alternate to Van Allen, who was out of the country at the time.

It was a pleasure to work with George and to review Opening Space Research, a welcome addition to the historical literature documenting the genesis of US space exploration.