After Sputnik
1957 Russians launch Sputnik
- scares the heck out of America
- crash program at NRL & Huntsville
1958 Van Allen (& grad students)
- Discover the radiation belts
1961 Ted Northrop & Edwin Teller
- publish the mathematical derivation of “adiabatic invariants of the motion”
Real $, “Big” science, the founding of NASA & the birth of a “discipline”