Word: jastrow
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Like the nuclear arms race, the space race is characterized by rhetorical half-truths, hysterical warnings and a sizable dose of governmental paranoia. Robert Jastrow, founder of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goodard Institute for Space Studies, has asserted in a recent New York Times Magazine article that "since Sputnik, Moscow has undertaken a massive military space program that appears designed to do nothing less than control space." But apart from shadowy references to a 1957 speech by then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Jastrow's case against the USSR relied mainly on speculation...
Noting, for example, that the Soviet Union plans to build a large space station, Jastrow quotes the head Pentagon scientist, who last month suggested that the station "may be the forerunner of a weapons platform." That the USSR launched 125 satellites last year while NASA sent up only 18 leads Jastrow to suspect that some of the Soviet devices are actually "killer satellites that can lurk in orbit" for long periods of time until detonated from the ground. Jastrow most fears the Soviets may someday have enough such killer satellites to abruptly declare the space above the USSR off-limits...
...astronomers should be able to see out 14 billion light-years (seven times farther than they can see using the biggest earthbound reflectors), expanding the volume of the known universe about 350-fold and bringing them very close to what is presumed to be its "edge." Says Physicist Robert Jastrow (God and the Astronomers): "We don't know what we'll find out there, whose hand we'll see at work." Also in 1985, the shuttle is slated to get the Galileo spacecraft on its way: an unmanned package of instruments that will drop a probe into...
...design, has been made known to man mainly through the free inquiry of science. The true study of evolution, moreover, is a humbling experience that gives man only a tiny niche in the vast scheme of the universe. "Never lose a holy curiosity," Einstein once wrote. Says Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow: "Astronomers have proven that the creation of the universe is the result of forces beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, but the rest of the story, leading from the creation to man, is explained very well by the scientific evidence in the fossil record...
...Thomas, 66, whose humane writings on biology and medicine in the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine became the basis for two bestsellers (The Lives of a Cell, The Medusa and the Snail). Others include Physicists Jeremy Bernstein, 50, a regular contributor to The New Yorker; Robert Jastrow, 55, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies; and Princeton's Gerard O'Neill, 53, the leading apostle of space colonization. There is also the British physician Jonathan Miller, whose medical series The Body in Question is running on PBS and is the basis of a current book. Most...