 As Director, he pressed for programs that would be responsive to emerging national problems, such as investigations of gold resources and off-shore oil and gas exploration.He established the National Center of Earthquake Research in response to problems revealed by the 1964 Alaska earthquake.As Director, he advocated for the creation of a remote sensing satellite that would be used to gather information about the surface of the Earth, which became the Landsat program, the longest-running project for gathering images of Earth from space.