Space Research and Space Weather: Some Personal Vignettes 1965 to Early 1980s

Abstract

Personal vignettes are given on early days of space research, space weather, and space advisory activities from 1965 to early 1980s.Space flight … . Space research … . As did many nuclear physics and particle physics graduate students near the beginning of the space age, I found very enticing the research challenges presented by the new access to Earth's environment above the sensible atmosphere. Sputnik had flown in October 1957. Space flight and the engineering involved were certainly topics of conversation in my initial physics mechanics class that Fall at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (from which I graduated in 1960 with a degree in Engineering Physics). As I was finishing up my physics graduate work in the late winter of 1964-1965, my Harvard thesis advisor, Professor Frank Pipkin, encouraged me to seriously consider tenure track nuclear physics-related faculty positions at several universities, including Penn and Princeton (who were collaborating to operate the ultimately short-lived [7 year] Penn-Princeton 3-GeV proton synchrotron). I did my thesis on the Harvard-MIT Cambridge Electron Accelerator (6 GeV), one of the last (the last?) "smaller" electron machines. Job DecisionI had the growing perception that nuclear and particle physics research was beginning to become ever larger science endeavors, with fewer individual investigator opportunities. Looming on the horizon, and ultimately a major reason for the short life of the Penn-Princeton machine, was the national (now Fermi) accelerator (500 GeV) to be built in Batavia, Illinois. And Stanford was building the 2-mile-long electron linear accelerator (50 GeV). It appeared from the outside perspective of a perhaps naive graduate student that space research instrumentation was small (even though launched in large satellites on large rockets), certainly in comparison to the large existing accelerators and their beam lines and the projects proposed for the future. At the time, particle detectors for space flight could be held in the palm of a hand! And for reasons that are hard to precisely recall more than 50 years later, I wanted to explore programs outside universities and even the new Goddard Space Flight Center government laboratory. American companies seemed to be leading much of the new space effort. That is what corporate advertising and corporate recruiting brochures promoted. At the time, large American corporations had central research laboratories conducting cutting edge research and development for their corporate business units. Well known by the public and very well respected were laboratories that included General Electric, RCA, Sylvania, AT&T and Western Electric, DuPont, Hewlett-Packard, Avco-Everett, and 3M. These laboratories had the objectives to pursue research that could foster and enhance and enlarge their underlying corporate missions and businesses. At this writing, near the end of the second decade of the 21st century, the importance of centralized corporate research is playing a far lesser role in businesses, even ...