Up For Auction "Planetary Physicist" Robert Jastrow Hand Signed TLS Dated 1964. 

ES-2623C

Robert Jastrow (September

7, 1925 – February 8, 2008) was an American astronomer and planetary physicist. He was a 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. In an interview

with Christianity Today, Jastrow said "Astronomers now

find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by

their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which

you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this

cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a

product of forces they cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone

would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven

fact." He

was open to the possibility of extra-terrestrial life in

the universe, but skeptical of the proposed alien origin of UFOs due

to a lack of strong physical evidence that would support this hypothesis. Jastrow,

together with Fred Seitz and William Nierenberg,

established the George C. Marshall

Institute to counter the

scientists who were arguing against U. S. President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense

Initiative, arguing for equal time in the media. This institute was

later critical of the scientific

consensus on anthropogenic global warming. Jastrow acknowledged

the earth was experiencing a warming trend, but claimed that the cause was

likely to be natural variation.