Following the election of President Kennedy in 1961, James E. Webb replaced Dr. Glennan as Administrator of NASA. Shortly after, a new national goal was announced—placing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth in this decade. Meanwhile, JPL had been assigned responsibility for unmanned exploration of the Moon, the planets, and interplanetary space, and thus was charged with supporting the NASA manned flight program through these activities. In less than five years, NASA grew to include eight flight and research centers and about 21,000 technical and management personnel. Within NASA, Dr. Abe Silverstein’s Office of Space Flight Programs was responsible for the Mariner R Project which was directly assigned to Ed Cortright, Director of Lunar & Planetary Programs, and Fred Kochendorfer, who is NASA’s Program Chief for Mariner. A subsequent reorganization placed responsibility under Dr. Homer Newell’s Office of Space Sciences, and Oran Nicks became Director of Lunar & Planetary Programs. JPL: JATO TO MARINER The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, staffed and operated for NASA by California Institute of Technology, had long been active in research and development in the fields of missiles, rockets, and the space-associated sciences. The first government-sponsored rocket research group in the United States, JPL had originated on the Caltech campus in 1939, an outgrowth of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratories, then headed by celebrated aerodynamicist Dr. Theodore von Karman. Von Karman and his associates moved their operation to a remote spot at the foot of the San Gabriel mountains and, working from this base, in 1941 the pioneering group developed the first successful jet-assisted aircraft takeoff (JATO) units for the Army Air Force. The Laboratory began a long association with the Army Ordnance Corps in 1944, when the Private A test rocket was developed. In retrospect, it is now recognized that the Private A was the first U. S. surface-to-surface, solid-propellant rocket. Its range was 10 miles! JPL’s WAC Corporal rocket set a U. S. high-altitude record of 43.5 miles in 1945. Mounted on a German V-2 as the Bumper-WAC, it achieved an altitude record of 250 miles in 1947. More important, this event was the first successful in-flight separation of a two-stage rocket—the feasibility of space exploration had been proved. After the end of World War II, JPL research set the stage for high-energy solid-propellant rockets. For the first time the solid propellants, which contained both fuel and oxidizers, were cast in thin-walled cases. Techniques were then developed for bonding the propellants to the case, and burning radially outward from the central axis was achieved. Attention was then turned to increasing the energy of the propellants.