"If I could go to Mars tomorrow, I'm gone."
Robert Duane Ballard was born June 30, 1942, in Wichita, Kansas, to Chester Patrick (an aerospace executive) and Harriet Nell (May) Ballard. However, Ballard and his three siblings were raised in southern California, where he developed a passion for the sea. The fair-haired teenager would spend much of his time at the beach near his home in San Diego, becoming an avid swimmer, surfer, fisherman, and scuba diver. Ballard's father was a flight engineer at a testing ground in the Mojave Desert, but was later appointed the U.S. Navy's representative to the famous Scripps Institute of Oceanography. When he was still in high school, Ballard wrote a letter to the Scripps Institute that asked, "I love the ocean--what can I do"" he recalled to Bayard Webster in the New York Times. Subsequently, the school invited him to attend a summer program.
Ballard went on to earn a bachelor of science degree in chemistry and geology in 1965 from the University of California at Santa Barbara, but he never lost interest in the sea. After graduating, he pursued post-graduate work at the University of Hawaii Institute of Geophysics in 1965-66, where he made money as the keeper of two trained porpoises at Sea Life Park.
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