Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Geodynamics Series, Volume 25.

There are times in the history of a science when the evolving technology has been combined with a singleness of purpose to make possible the next great step. For space geodesy the decade of the 1980s was one of those times. Initiated in the early 1980s, the NASA Cnistal Dynamics Project (CDP), a global venture of unprecedented proportions, exploited new technologies to confirm and refine tectonic theories and to advance geodynamics.