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At 2.19 pm on 29 November 1967, at the height of the Space Race, Australia became only the fourth country in the world, after the USA, the Soviet Union and France, to launch its own satellite from its own territory.

Australia at the time recognised the potential of the new space exploration technologies and actively sought to attain them. By the 1960s the rocket range at Woomera was well known nationally and internationally for its contribution to space research, especially in the field of upper-atmospheric investigation – using both locally and internationally designed and built sounding rockets.

In February 1960, the Australian and US governments formally agreed to cooperate in space flight programs undertaken by the US. The opportunity for the WRESAT launch arose after a series of trials at Woomera known as Project SPARTA researching the physical effects of high-speed re-entry of warheads. A spare SPARTA rocket (a three-stage launch vehicle, the first stage of which was the highly successful American Redstone missile) remained unused at the end of the trials. Rather than return it to the US, a proposal for the WRESAT project was submitted.

The WRE satellite itself, its associated instrumentation and the experiments it carried, were designed, built and tested jointly by the Weapons Research Establishment and the Physics Department of the University of Adelaide. As well as the US Government Sparta Trials Organisation donating the launch vehicle, its coordinating contractor, TRW Inc, provided the vehicle preparation team. NASA supplied global tracking, orbit determination and data records, and support was also lent by the British Ministry of Technology and the Centre National d’Études Spatiales, France.