Frank Drake was one of the very first members of the NRAO Scientific Staff along with Dave Heeschen and John Findlay. He lived in Green Bank for five years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, overseeing development of instruments, conducting experiments with the first radio telescopes, and working to establish NRAO as a institution with scientific credibility. He also did Project Ozma, the first deliberate search for radio emissions from extraterrestrial intelligence.

Planning for Project Ozma was begun in 1959, at a time when the only telescope at NRAO was the recentlycompleted Howard E. Tatel 85 Foot. Drake reasoned that the 85 Foot Telescope would be able to detect radio signals from the strongest transmitters then in existence on Earth out to a distance of several parsecs. He began a modest project to build a 21 cm receiver for this experiment but made sure that it could be used for other research so that the marginal cost of the Project could be kept very low.

The Project Ozma observations were made in the spring and summer of 1960, and although no detections resulted, the experiment started an area of research which has grown with time and has certainly touched the imagination of the public. While at Green Bank, Drake also penned his famous equation which gives the number of currently detectable civilizations in the Galaxy as a function of a number of variables.

Portions of this description were excerpted from a January 2000 newletter article written by Jay Lockman.