The aircraft was shipped on May 5, 1913, in five crates to Tucson, Arizona, via Wells Fargo Express, and then moved through the border into Mexico to the town of Naco, Sonora.

Martin's first big success came during World War I with the MB-1 bomber,[4] a large biplane design ordered by the United States Army on January 17, 1918.

In 1929, Martin sold the Cleveland plant and built a new one in Middle River, Maryland, northeast of Baltimore.

[6] The Martin Company also produced the noted China Clipper flying boats used by Pan American Airways for its transpacific San Francisco to the Philippines route.

During World War II, a few of Martin's most successful designs were the B-26 Marauder[7] and A-22 Maryland bombers, the PBM Mariner and JRM Mars[8][9] flying boats, widely used for air-sea rescue, anti-submarine warfare and transport.

[11] The company built 1,585 B-26 Marauders and 531 Boeing B-29 Superfortresses at its new bomber plant in Nebraska, just south of Omaha at Offutt Field.

Among the B-29s manufactured there were all the Silverplate aircraft, including Enola Gay and Bockscar, which dropped the two war-ending atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

The Vanguard was the first American space exploration rocket designed from scratch to be an orbital launch vehicle — rather than being a modified ballistic missile (such as the U.S. Army's Juno I).

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) awarded the design and production contracts for these to the North American Aviation Corporation.

Finally, the US Air Force required a booster rocket that could launch heavier satellites than either the Titan IIIE or the Space Shuttle.