(Dr. William Pickering (director of JPL), Dr. James Van Allen, and Dr. Wernher von Braun holding up an Explorer 1 model, the first successful satellite launched by the US on 31 Jan 1958).
James Van Allen dies at age 91. One of the original space pioneers, his Van Allen Belts were big news about space when I was in elementary school.
I didn't realize his involvement in the International Geophysical Year (1957) which the NYT article says was “born in his living room in Silver Spring, Md,” in 1950.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/science/space/10vanallen.html
http://www.space.com/news/ap_060809_vanallen_obit.html