Poulter and Byrd were honored by a public parade in Mount Pleasant the next summer, and Admiral Byrd delivered the chief commencement address at Van Allen's graduation exercises.
In 1946, Van Allen returned to the Applied Physics Laboratory where he organized and directed a team to conduct high-altitude experimental work using V2 and Aerobee rockets, and, in 1951, he accepted a Guggenheim research fellowship at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.