The intercontinental ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear warheads from American silos to Soviet cities — their accuracy, their reliability, their design — was the mathematical problem that many of the most gifted engineers and mathematicians in the country were working on.

Lockheed’s involvement in missile development was substantial.

The company that built the P-80 and later the U-2 and the SR-71 also had significant work in ballistic missiles and in the systems that would eventually carry American satellites and astronauts into space.

The mathematics of missile trajectories — how a ballistic missile follows its path from launch to target, how the flight path is calculated, how inaccuracies accumulate through the flight and how engineering design decisions affect that accumulation — was directly connected to the mathematics of space trajectories.

The physics is the same.