This project examines the early use of rockets and satellites over the period 1946 through the early 1960s to study the upper atmosphere and space. The central thread of this collection is how the availability of new technologies for research, first the rocket and later satellites, helped to create a new social matrix for research. The key institutional elements of this matrix were parts of the military, such as the office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Laboratory, the Johns Hopkis Applied Physics Laboratory, the Army's White Sands Proving Ground, and the Air Force Cambridge Research Center; a group of universities and scientists such as the University of Iowa and James Van Allen; researach coordinating bodies such as the Upper Air Rocket Research Panel; and, at the end of the 1950s, NASA.