When, in the words of former JPL director William Hayward Pickering, researchers "came along with this sounding rocket which really didn't fit the pattern" of "getting bigger as you went along", the rocket "was named after the Women’s Army Corps (WAC)".
At the time of his retirement as director, in 1976, the Voyager missions were about to launch on tours of the outer planets and Viking 1 was on its way to land on Mars.
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William Hayward Pickering is not to be confused with William Henry Pickering, an astronomer from an earlier era.
William Hayward Pickering (1910–2004), former director of the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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