WASHINGTON — In what turned out to be a successful bid to mature critical guidance and navigation technology needed for extraterrestrial landings, engineers at Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., wired an experimental guidance and navigation system into a suborbital test rocket and performed a simulated lunar landing.

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Dan Leone is the NASA reporter for SpaceNews, where he also covers other civilian-run U.S. government space programs and a growing number of entrepreneurial space companies. He joined SpaceNews in 2011.Dan earned a bachelor's degree in public communications...