At midnight on January 31, 1963, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) officially began operating. The results of years of careful planning, AIAA was a new society formed by the merger of two venerable predecessor societies, the American Rocket Society, which had begun in 1930 as the American Interplanetary Society, and the Institute of the Aerospace Sciences, established in 1932 as the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences. Although many of the roughly 36, 500 total members in both societies had argued against the merger, the vote was strongly in favor of combining. The hard part, that of sorting out over 60 years’ combined activities of publications, awards, local sections, and staff, was still ahead.

• The IAS – Early Years (1932-1945)
• The IAS – Later Years (1945 to 1963)
• The ARS – Early Years (1930-1944)
• The ARS – Later Years (1944 – 1963)
• The Merger - 1963
• AIAA – 1988 to the Present

Information taken from Rocketeers and Gentlemen Engineers: A History of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics…and What Came Before by Tom Crouch. More Info >