Prospector arose as a result of President John F. Kennedy's desire to rehabilitate the tarnished image of US spaceflight. In 1961, NASA proposed a series of unmanned probes, including Prospector, to be managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Prospector was based on a study that had been performed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in June 1960, to determine what lunar missions could be achieved using the Saturn I rocket.