Robert Jastrow

Robert Jastrow (September 7, 1925 – February 8, 2008) was an American astronomer and planetary physicist. He was a leading NASA scientist, populist author and futurist.

Jastrow attended Townsend Harris High School and was invited to attend Camp Rising Sun. He went to Columbia University for college and graduate school, where he received his A.B., A.M. and PhD in theoretical physics, in 1948. Afterwards he joined NASA when it was formed in 1958.

He was the first chairman of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Committee, which established the scientific goals for the exploration of the moon during the Apollo lunar landings. At the same time he was also the Chief of the Theoretical Division at NASA (1958–61). He became the founding director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in 1961, and served until his retirement from NASA in 1981. Concurrently he was also a Professor of Geophysics at Columbia University.

After his NASA career he became a Professor of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth College (1979–1992), and was a Member of the NASA Alumni Association. Jastrow was also a Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the George C. Marshall Institute, and Director Emeritus of Mount Wilson Observatory and Hale Solar Laboratory.

His expressed views on creation were that although he was an "agnostic, and not a believer", it seems to him that "the curtain drawn over the mystery of creation will never be raised by human efforts, at least in the foreseeable future" due to "the circumstances of the big bang-the fiery holocaust that destroyed the record of the past". With the discovery of the Big Bang, Jastrow began to hold a belief that, if there was a beginning to the universe, there was also a Creator.

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