This book is a history of the Lunar Orbiter Program documenting the origins of the program and recording the activity of the missions. Lunar Orbiter brought several new departures in U.S. efforts to explore the Moon before landing men there. It was the first big deep space project for Langley Research Center. It came into being in 1963 after the Ranger and Surveyor Programs were well along in their development and at a time when the data it could acquire would be timely to Apollo.
The decade of the sixties was filled with turbulence, discontent, and upheaval. It also was a time of outstanding achievements in advancing our knowledge of the world in which we live. We accelerated the exploration of our planet from space. We landed men on the Moon, brought them safely home again, and learned how they could survive in space. And we began sending unmanned planetary explorers to chart the solar system and to search for signs of life on Mars. It is the purpose of this history to recount one chapter in this exploration, as a small contribution to the store of knowledge about America's first voyages on the new ocean of space.
