Robert Jastrow; helped make space understandable for public
WASHINGTON - Robert Jastrow, an astronomer and science administrator who helped explain science to a mass audience, died of pneumonia Feb. 8 at his home in suburban Arlington, Va. He was 82.
Dr. Jastrow, former head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, helped found the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington, an organization that assesses scientific issues affecting public policy.
In that role, he was a well-known supporter of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as "Star Wars," and wrote a 1985 book about it, "How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete," that was as controversial as the proposal itself. He also wrote skeptically for the Marshall Institute about the existence and impact of climate change.
His best-known book, "Red Giants and White Dwarfs" (1967), helped explain space to a public hungry for news about atmospheric science.
A frequent television guest and author of magazine and newspaper articles, Dr. Jastrow was often quoted by both policymakers and partisans. Columnist Charles Krauthammer noted that at the end of his 1978 book "God and the Astronomers," Dr. Jastrow made an "homage to theology."
The scientist, Dr. Jastrow wrote, "has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
Dr. Jastrow also expected that by the mid-1990s, computers would be a new form of life, telling one interviewer for Contemporary Authors in 1984 that computers would be competitive with humanity.
"The computer will lack wisdom, but it will have enormous thinking power," Dr. Jastrow said. "By that time it will be capable of subtleties of judgment that will be very impressive, but it will still be doing a rather linear kind of thinking. It will not have the richness of human thought, at least not in the degree we have it."
He was born in New York and graduated from Columbia University, where he also received a master's degree in 1945 and a doctoral degree in 1948, both in physics.
He was hired at NASA shortly after its inception in 1958 to head its theoretical division.
In 1961, he was named director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, which did research in astronomy, atmospheric science, and weather and climate prediction, and worked on projects such as Pioneer, Voyager, and Galileo.
He was chairman of the Mount Wilson Institute, which runs the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, from 1992 to 2003. He also taught at Yale, Columbia, and Dartmouth universities.
Dr. Jastow's marriage to Ruth Witenberg ended in divorce. He leaves no immediate survivors.
