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. 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, 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.
Views on controversial issues
Creation
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."
UFOs
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.
Climate change
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.
God And The Astronomers, W. W. Norton & Company, 2000 2nd edition, paperback:. The Big Bang theory and the argument from design. Second edition contains appendices with Roman Catholic and Jewish perspectives.
The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the UniverseSimon & Schuster hardcover:, Touchstone 1983 paperback:, Oxford Univ Press 1993 paperback:. The evolution of life and the development of the human mind. The title is from the 1937–38 Gifford Lectures by Charles Sherrington: "It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns."
Journey to the Stars: Space Exploration—Tomorrow and Beyond, Transworld Publishers, Ltd hardcover:, Bantam paperback:
Periodicals
Various articles on astronomy and space for The New York Times, Reader's Digest, Foreign Affairs, Commentary Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and Scientific American.
Maternal biography
Marie Jastrow, Looking Back: The American Dream Through Immigrant Eyes, 1907–1918,, W. W. Norton & Company,
