These days, it's really been uninteresting except when disasters occur.

1952: As TIME reported in 1959 "Van Allen’s ‘Rockoons’ could not be fired in Iowa for fear that the spent rockets would strike an Iowan or his house. 1985: Van Allen stepped down as the head of the Dept. S.

The Van Allen radiation belts were named after him following the 1958 satellite missions (Explorer 1 and Explorer 3) in which Van Allen had argued that a Geiger counter should be used to detect charged particles.