When the crew of Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969, Americans hailed the successful completion of the most complex technological undertaking of the 20th century: landing humans on the moon and returning them safely to earth. This document records the engineering and scientific accomplishments of the people who made lunar exploration possible. It shows how scientists and engineers worked out their differences and conducted a program that was a major contribution to science as well as a stunning engineering accomplishment.

Sounding rockets provided the first means to carry instruments to the outermost reaches of the Earth's atmosphere. They were, indeeed, our first space vehicles. As Mr. Corliss relates in this history, in this day of satellites and deep space probes, sounding rockets remain as important to space science as ever, furnishing our most powerful means for obtaining vertical profiles of atmospheric properties. NASA continues to depend on sounding rockets for research in astronomy, meteorology, ionospheric physics, exploratory astronomy, and other disciplines.