Robert Jastrow, R.I.P.(OBITUARY II)(Obituary)

ROBERT JASTROW was a scientist among scientists. The story goes that in the 1950s, during the question period at a seminar organized by Robert Oppenheimer, the young Jastrow stood up to offer an unconventional theory about the behavior of neutrons and protons. Oppenheimer gently ridiculed him at the time; but later, when Jastrow had worked out his idea in a scholarly article, Oppenheimer admitted it fit the data and retracted his criticism.

Jastrow was one of the very first people hired by NASA in 1958, as head of its theoretical division, and in 1961, at age 36, he became the director of its Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He strongly favored the Apollo moon-landing project, for two reasons. As a scientist, he saw the moon as a magnificent source of information about the earth and indeed the whole solar system: Lacking an atmosphere and water, it had not suffered erosion as the earth had, and therefore "has preserved the record of its past for an exceptionally long time." And as an American, he accepted the second reason, the one that carried far more weight with Washington policymakers: "The main point was to refute what some were thinking, 'The U.S. is on the way downhill, and it can't match the Soviets' technological achievements.'"

A scientist among scientists, Jastrow also had the rarer ability to open a window on science to the general public. Starting in 1967 with Red Giants and White Dwarfs, he gained a wide reputation for his ability to explain difficult concepts to a nonscientific audience. In 1984 he co-founded an organization, the George C. Marshall Institute, to inform the public on scientific issues relating to ...