Space Sciences Lab Celebrates 50 Years and 75 Satellites

Space Science lab, you say? Without reading the article or doing a search, would you know where it is? NASA? At JPL in Houston? At Goddard Space Center? Or maybe Cape Canaveral? Nope. The Space Science Lab (SSL) is in UC-Berkeley, and it is celebrating it's 50th Anniversary!

Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) has provided instruments for 75 satellites, two dozen rockets, nearly 200 balloon flights and numerous ground-based experiments. Eight of the satellites were conceived, designed, built and controlled within the lab's two hilltop buildings overlooking Berkeley and San Francisco Bay.

"The University of California at Berkeley showed its greatness when it founded the Space Sciences Laboratory at the very dawning of the space age, only a year after NASA was created," said Charles F. Kennel, former director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and a member of the NASA committee now debating the future of human space flight. Kennel, who directed NASA's Mission to Planet Earth from 1994 to 1996, will be the keynote speaker at a banquet this Saturday (Aug. 29) celebrating the lab's anniversary.

Congratulations to an amazing facility that has made such an impact!

Zz.