The Early Evolution of Deep Space Navigation

Abstract

An existing series of papers has described the evolution of deep space navigation over the time interval 1962 to 2021. 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 1960 s. 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.