For a few years in the early 1960s, some of the most advanced space research at the University of California, Berkeley was conducted in a rented storefront on University Avenue. The scientists called it "the Market" - or sometimes "the Shoe Store" - and inside this converted shop, graduate students assembled instruments bound for orbit while social scientists in the next room studied how those same physicists organized their work. It was gloriously scrappy, and it was only the beginning. The Space Sciences Laboratory that grew from that improvised workshop now occupies a cluster of buildings high in the Berkeley Hills, overlooking the San Francisco Bay, and has built instruments that have flown on more than one hundred satellites.
The idea emerged in 1958, when a group of Berkeley faculty realized that rockets and satellites were about to open entirely new frontiers for science. The committee that proposed a dedicated space lab was chaired first by astronomer Otto Struve and later by physicist Edward Teller, already famous for his role in the hydrogen bomb. Their recommendation landed on the desk of Chancellor Glenn T. Seaborg - himself a Nobel Prize-winning chemist - who championed it alongside University President Clark Kerr. The Regents authorized the Space Sciences Laboratory in 1959, and operations began in January 1960 under the first director, Professor Samuel Silver. What set the lab apart from the start was its insistence on crossing disciplinary boundaries. This would not be a physics lab or a biology lab. It would be a space lab, and anyone with a question that required leaving Earth's surface was welcome.
Growth was immediate and messy. Silver's team started in a corner of the old Leuschner Observatory on the main campus, but a large project on space physiology led by Professors Hardin B. Jones and Cornelius A. Tobias quickly demanded more room, forcing a move to the Ford Assembly Building in Richmond. Meanwhile, the space physics group under Professor Kinsey A. Anderson - running experiments on balloons, rockets, and satellites - spilled into that rented storefront at 2119 University Avenue. Electronic shops, a machine shop, data processing equipment, environmental test gear, and research on the Moon, the planets, and the upper atmosphere all crammed into the same building. The fragmentation was productive but unsustainable. A NASA facilities grant awarded in 1962 finally made it possible to consolidate, and the laboratory's permanent buildings in the Berkeley Hills were dedicated on October 27, 1966. From those hilltop facilities, the instruments kept flying: more than 150 high-altitude balloons measuring electric fields, auroral X-rays, gamma rays, cosmic rays, and the cosmic microwave background, plus two dozen rockets probing auroral particles, ultraviolet emissions, and solar flare nuclei.
Among the lab's many projects, one captured the public imagination like no other. SETI@home, launched in 1999 from Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, invited anyone with a computer and an internet connection to help analyze radio telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. At its peak, SETI@home was the world's largest distributed computing project, with millions of users donating idle processing power to scan signals collected at the Arecibo Observatory. The project ran for over two decades before entering hibernation in 2020, having processed enormous quantities of data without detecting an alien signal - but having demonstrated that citizen science at a planetary scale was possible. The search continues through the broader Berkeley SETI Research Center, which remains part of the lab.
The lab's ambitions have never been limited to listening. Its current portfolio spans planetary science, geospace research, solar and heliophysics, astrophysics, and exoplanet studies, supported by a dedicated engineering division and mission operations center. One of its most recent undertakings is ESCAPADE - the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers - a pair of twin satellites built at Berkeley and nicknamed Blue and Gold after the university colors. Designed to study how the solar wind strips away the Martian atmosphere, the ESCAPADE mission represents the lab's continued ability to conceive, build, and operate spacecraft from a university campus. It is a long way from a shoe store on University Avenue, but the spirit is recognizable: ask a big question, build something to answer it, and figure out where to put everyone later.
The Space Sciences Laboratory sits at an elevation that offers sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, and on clear days, the Farallon Islands. It is a fitting perch for a place dedicated to looking outward. The lab operates as an Organized Research Unit of UC Berkeley, led by faculty and Senior Fellows who report to the Vice Chancellor for Research. Its Center for Science Education runs outreach programs that connect the public to the same sense of wonder that drew those first faculty members into a committee room in 1958. More than six decades later, instruments conceived in these hilltop buildings continue to orbit Earth, drift through the solar system, and point toward stars whose light left before the lab existed. The shoe store is long gone, but its successor keeps building things that fly.
The Space Sciences Laboratory sits at 37.88N, 122.244W in the Berkeley Hills, above the UC Berkeley campus. From the air, look for the cluster of buildings on the western slope of the hills, overlooking San Francisco Bay. The lab is at approximately 1,200 feet elevation, set against the backdrop of Grizzly Peak and Tilden Regional Park. Nearest airports: Oakland International (KOAK) approximately 10 nm south, and Buchanan Field (KCCR) approximately 15 nm northeast. The Bay Area is subject to summer fog, particularly in the mornings, but the Berkeley Hills often sit above the fog layer.