[1] Prospector arose as a result of President John F. Kennedy's desire to rehabilitate the tarnished image of US spaceflight.
In 1961, NASA proposed a series of robotic probes, including Prospector, to be managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
[2] Prospector was based on a study that had been performed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in June 1960, to determine what lunar missions could be achieved using the Saturn I rocket.
NASA envisioned Prospector as "a large versatile 'space truck'"[3] that could be launched by a Saturn rocket and that could soft-land on the Moon with a wide variety of payloads.
[4] However, as plans progressed, the project ran into weight overruns, requiring a larger launcher such as the Saturn V.[2] Its role also began to change from one of support for the Apollo missions to more of a substitute for them,[2] which NASA's Space Task Group did not endorse.