Robert Jastrow, R.I.P

National Review, March 10, 2008

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 public policy. Two of the issues nearest his heart were missile defense and global warming.

It was the debate over President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative that brought Jastrow into NR's orbit (or vice versa). In late 1986 he and several colleagues at the Marshall Institute produced a paper on the technical issues involved in SDI deployment. Impressed, NR asked Jastrow if he would be willing to keep our readers apprised of the scientific progress of the program and the political difficulties it faced, both at home and abroad. He was indeed willing, and the result was a feature that ran in "The Week" for the next two years, titled "SDI Watch," in which we learned about everything from the government's "business as usual" management and procurement procedures, to the importance of a space-based defense that would have the ability to strike at missiles during their launch phase, to the development of "smart rocks" and "brilliant pebbles." One "SDI Watch"--opened at random--offers a beautiful example of Jastrow's explanatory skill: "The fragility of a ballistic missile is not widely appreciated. The Soviet SS-18--the largest ICBM in the world--weighs two hundred tons and stands as tall as a ten-story building, but its aluminum skin is no thicker than cardboard. In fact, the SS-18 is, relatively speaking, as fragile as an eggshell; for both SS-18s and eggs, the ratio of the weight of the container loaded to its weight empty is about 10 to 1."

Profound scientist, inspiring teacher, fearless polemicist: Bob Jastrow did more than most of us know for his country, his students, his friends.