1 June

1937: On 1 June 1937, Theodore von Kármán, Director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, United States established a group that began experiments in design fundamentals of high-altitude sounding rockets.

The group was named the Cal Tech Rocket Research Project. It was the origin of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory which later became part of NASA.

NASA later designed and launched many scientific missions to explore the Solar System and peer into the Universe.