Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been a world leader in space research from the earliest days of the subject. 

Jet Propulsion Laboratory began life in 1936 as a semi-official group attached to Caltech’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory. It started as off campus facility used by several Caltech graduate students to conduct rocket propulsion experiments.

Until the transfer of its jurisdiction to NASA in late 1958, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was under the jurisdiction of the US Army.

With the growing fears of the Cold War, Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory became very heavily involved in work on missile technology.

It played a major role in the production of the first tactical nuclear weapons; and in consequence, moves sharply away from basic investigations towards engineering developments.

Working with Wernher von Braun’s; rocket team at the army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers developed the upper stages and payload for the first United States satellite, Explorer I, launched on January 31, 1958.

In the 1960s, Jet Propulsion Laboratory began to conceive and excite robotic spacecraft to explore other worlds. Ranger and Surveyor or missions were launched to the moon, and Mariner missions visited Mercury, Venus and Mars.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory has since achieved stunning successes with an armada of mission such as Voyager, Galileo, Magellan, Deep Space I, and Mars Pathfinder.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory