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...