The forerunner of the Deep Space Network was established in January 1958, when JPL, then under contract to the U.S. Army, deployed portable radio tracking stations in Nigeria, Singapore, and California to receive telemetry and plot the orbit of the Army-launched Explorer 1, the first successful U.S.

[1] NASA (and the DSN by extension) was officially established on October 1, 1958, to consolidate the separately developing space-exploration programs of the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Air Force into one civilian organization.

[2] On December 3, 1958, JPL was transferred from the US Army to NASA and given responsibility for the design and execution of lunar and planetary exploration programs using remotely controlled spacecraft.

The coded doppler, ranging, and command (CODORAC) system developed by Eberhardt Rechtin, Richard Jaffe, and Walt Victor became the basis for much of the DSIF's electronics.

Under this concept, it has become a world leader in the development of low-noise receivers; large parabolic-dish antennas; tracking, telemetry, and command systems; digital signal processing; and deep space navigation.

The DSN started the period able to support JPL designed spacecraft and telemetry and was progressively improved to cope with the increased demands placed upon it by new programs.

In 1963 the availability of new amplifiers and transmitters operating in the S-band (at 2,200 MHz) allowed the DSN to take advantage of better tracking performance at the higher frequency, and later missions were designed to use it.

For political and logistical reasons the new overseas stations were established at Robledo near Madrid in Spain, and at Tidbinbilla near Canberra in Australia, and the second network of 26m antennas was operational in 1965.

Mobile DSN equipment was used at Cape Canaveral to check out spacecraft compatibility and operation prior to launch, and monitor the early flight.

To obtain the early trajectory data vital for mid-course corrections, a new station with a small and fast-moving antenna was built on Ascension Island and became DSS 72.

The Pioneer, Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter programs all supplied mission-dependent equipment at the tracking stations for command and telemetry processing purposes and this could be quite large.

To simplify the problems of accommodating special command and telemetry equipment and personnel at stations, the DSN developed a "multi-mission" approach.

A generic set of equipment would be provided that future missions would all use, and a start was made by introducing computers at the stations to decode telemetry.

Something had happened to the spacecrafi but no one knew just what.Mudgway continues:[1] While the DSN was committed to support one Mariner at a time in a mission-critical phase, this situation presented one spacecraft approaching encounter and a second one with a serious and unknown problem.

The special "Tiger Team" at JPL was able to overcome the Mariner 7 attitude problem by using the real-time high-rate telemetry sight, the TV cameras on Mars, in time to carry out a very successful encounter.

For both encounters, the new High-Rate Telemetry System (HRT) proved its worth, not only in recovering from the Mariner 7 emergency, but also in providing a much faster channel for playing back TV and other high-rate science from Mars to Earth.Mariner 9, launched in 1971, was a Mars orbiter mission, a good deal more complicated than previous flyby missions and requiring precise navigation and high data rates.

Mariner 10 incorporated a Venus flyby followed by an orbiter round Mercury, and required the network of 64 m antennas and special DSN enhancements including use of a developmental supercooled maser at DSS 43, installation of an S/X-band dichroic reflector plate and feed cones at DSS 14 and enhanced data transmission circuits from the DSN stations to JPL.

The second encounter with Mercury in 1974 was at a greater distance and the technique of "arraying" antennas, which had been demonstrated by Spanish engineers at the Madrid complex, was used at Goldstone.

To support the Apollo crewed lunar-landing program NASA's Manned Space Flight Network (MSFN) installed extra 26 m antennas at Goldstone; Honeysuckle Creek,[12] Australia; and Fresnedillas,[13] Spain.

JPL was naturally reluctant to compromise the objectives of its many unmanned spacecraft by turning three of its DSN stations over to the MSFN for long periods.

How could the goals of both Apollo and deep space exploration be achieved without building a third 26m antenna at each of the three sites or undercutting planetary science missions?The solution came in early 1965 at a meeting at NASA Headquarters, when Eberhardt Rechtin suggested what is now known as the "wing concept".

Deep space missions would not be compromised nearly as much as if the entire station's equipment and personnel were turned over to Apollo for several weeks.The details of this cooperation and operation are available in a two-volume technical report from JPL.

This performance increase was vital for the return of science data during Voyager's successful encounters with Uranus and Neptune, and the early stages of its interstellar mission.

By arrangement the Very Large Array (VLA) had agreed to equip the 27 antennas with X-band receivers in order to communicate with Voyager at Neptune.

The coupling of the VLA with the Goldstone antenna subnet made possible significant science data return, particularly for imaging the planet and its satellite and for detecting rings around Neptune.

For example, the recovery of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) would not have been possible without the use of the largest DSN facilities.