On December 15, 1964, the first Italian satellite San Marco 1 was launched. For this reason, every December 16th, starting from 2021, the Italian National Space Day is celebrated. The Italian Space Agency would be established later, but in the 1950s, the Italian space industry was taking its first steps, primarily thanks to the efforts of engineer and aviator Luigi Broglio and physicist Edoardo Amaldi.

Both enjoyed great authority in their fields and before politics, and had important scientific and political contacts in the United States, with figures such as Gaetano Crocco, Theodore von Kármán, and Hugh Dryden of NASA. Their interest in space was able to break through political and institutional barriers.

In 1952, Broglio had founded the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Rome La Sapienza and became its director. In 1959, the Space Research Commission (CRS) of the CNR was born, later chaired by Broglio himself. Step by step, they managed to exert political pressure on the Italian government, which in October 1961 approved the San Marco program with funding of 4.5 billion lire.

During a space congress – COSPAR – held in 1961 in Florence, Broglio presented the program to some NASA members. He convinced them, and thus the San Marco program was born through an agreement between CRS and the US space agency. NASA would provide the Scout rockets for launch, Italy would develop the satellites and provide the launch platform. This was the San Marco platform, an ENI oil platform off the coast of Malindi, Kenya. There would be five missions between 1964 and 1988, of technical-scientific interest for both nations, but also important from a political perspective to strengthen ties between Italy and the United States, ties that in the space sector remain among the strongest in the world. At the end of the San Marco project after San Marco 5 in 1988, the Italian Space Agency was born.

The San Marco platform would not be ready before 1967, and for this reason San Marco 1 was launched from Wallops Island, Virginia. At 21:24 Italian time on December 15, 1964, the Scout rocket containing San Marco 1 lifted off. San Marco 1 was a small sphere about half a meter in size weighing 115 kilograms. NASA selected the satellite's scientific objectives: after all, without its launcher, the mission would not have taken off. It selected as the main experiment studying air density and wind characteristics in the upper atmosphere. Other experiments involved studying the effects of the atmosphere and ionosphere on long-range radio communication. During a period when the very first satellites were being launched into space, understanding the environment at the boundary between the atmosphere and open space was a goal of particular scientific interest.

There is always some ambiguity about whether Italy was the third or fifth country in the world to launch a satellite. Strictly speaking, Italy was the fifth country to do so, as after the Soviet Sputnik and the US Explorer, the UK's Ariel 1 and Canada's Alouette 1 were launched in 1962. However, there is a significant difference between the first English and Canadian satellites and the Italian one. Italy, apart from the launcher, completely developed and controlled the satellite through the mission team, while Canada and England developed only the scientific payload and delegated the rest of the process.