JPL: Then & Now

On Halloween 1936, five grad students studying at Caltech and two amateur rocket enthusiasts drove out to a dry canyon wash in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and helped jump-start the Space Age. It took them four attempts to light a liquid rocket engine. But the result was encouraging enough to keep going and to build more rockets, which led to an institution where this kind of work could be done every day -- the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This gallery pairs vintage images from JPL’s history with images that show what the lab looks like today. Grab the slider to move between the lab’s past and present.