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On August 16, 1984, the three spacecraft of the AMPTE mission were launched from Cape Canaveral into earth orbit atop a Delta rocket, culminating 13 years of planning and an intense three-year hardware effort. Each spacecraft was a complex, heavily instrumented, highly capable basic research tool, and each represented hundreds of man-years of effort. With the launch, a new phase of the program began, the large hardware teams moved on to other missions, and the AMPTE spacecraft began the mission in space for which they had been conceived. With both active experiments and a new and much more capable generation of instruments and data handling systems, AMPTE represents a significant advance in space plasma physics. The third anniversary of the launch seems a good time to reflect on the AMPTE mission and to review progress to date.