As World War II raged on, the Navy tasked the Applied Physics Laboratory to study a new threat to Allied ships: the first aircraft-launched anti-ship missiles. Was there a way to shoot down enemy planes long before they could fire these missiles? The answer that APL researchers came up with was "yes"— and Bumblebee, as that first missile was called, led to the Navy's first operational surface-to-air guided missiles: Terrier, Talos and Tartar. Terrier's and Tartar's legacies have carried on directly to the Standard missile, the Navy's primary surface-to-air defense missile.
