From the late 1950s, Riccardo Giacconi worked at American Science and Engineering (AS&E), a research company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, developing X-ray detectors carried by suborbital rockets. The original goal of the June 18, 1962 experiment was not to search for cosmic sources: the team — Giacconi, Herbert Gursky, Frank Paolini, and, as an advisor from MIT, Bruno Rossi — intended to detect X-rays reflected off the lunar surface, funded by the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories thanks to Rossi's lobbying of AS&E president Martin Annis. The Aerobee 130 rocket, launched from White Sands (New Mexico), carried the detector designed by Paolini. After several months of analysis in their laboratory, Giacconi, Gursky, and Paolini concluded that the signal came neither from the Moon nor from an instrument malfunction, but from a real source located in the constellation Scorpius, a thousand times more luminous in X-rays than the Sun across all wavelengths. They named the finding Scorpius X-1 (Sco X-1): the first X-ray source detected outside the solar system. The discovery, confirmed on later flights and published in Physical Review Letters, founded X-ray astronomy as its own observational field and revealed the existence of a population of objects — today identified as neutron stars and black holes in binary systems — invisible to conventional optical astronomy.