The Van Allen Radiation Belts: How their discovery worried lay scientists hungry for human spaceflight

Few twentieth century technological advances captivated the public’s attention as much as the advent of spaceflight. In the 1950s, popular science fiction magazines in the United States featured regular science essays from dual scientists and science popularizers such as Willy Ley covering all cutting-edge aspects of orbital mechanics and astrophysics. The discovery of the Earth’s radiation belts, enabled by the Explorer 1 satellite, caused a stir among the lay scientific community; Could a human survive a trip through these radiation belts to reach the stars, or was humanity trapped on Earth? We’ll look at the coverage in the media and genre magazines of the discovery of the Van Allen belts circa 1958, and see how such an obscure topic captivated a fandom hungry for human spaceflight.