Fred Singer was an Austrian-American physicist, and professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, who proposed a Minimum Orbital Unmanned Satellite of the Earth (MOUSE) at the fourth Congress of the International Astronautics Federation in Zurich, Switzerland, in the summer of 1953. It had been based upon two years of previous study conducted under the auspices of the British Interplanetary Society, which had built on the postwar research of the V-2 rocket. The Upper Atmosphere Rocket Research Panel at White Sands discussed Singer's plan in April 1954. In May, Singer presented his MOUSE proposal at the Hayden Planetarium's fourth Space Travel Symposium. MOUSE was the first satellite proposal widely discussed in nongovernmental engineering and scientific circles, although it never was adopted.