The Evolution of Deep Space Navigation: Prologue I

An existing series of papers has described the evolution of deep space navigation over the time interval 1962 to 2020. This paper complements the series by examining a broad range of prior or contemporaneous events, starting in the post-war years, that contributed to the successful navigation of NASA’s planetary missions of the early 1960s. Such events include post-war tests of sounding rockets and ballistic missiles; the tracking of the first Earth satellites; the construction and early evolution of what became the Deep Space Network; the creation of the first two generations of high-precision orbit determination and related trajectory software for lunar and planetary missions; and experience gained from navigating multiple NASA missions to the moon or into heliocentric orbit.