Title: How to Build a Space Mission: The Story of TRACERS

The Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites (TRACERS) mission, designed and led by the University of Iowa, successfully launched this summer. I will outline the scientific goals of the mission and describe what we hope to learn from TRACERS about our local space neighborhood and the impact of the Sun and the solar wind on our terrestrial environment. I will describe the long genesis and development of the TRACERS mission, from the proposal phase through design, assembly, test, integration, launch, and commissioning. At the end, I'll show some of the early "first light" data from the TRACERS instrument suite, which is now working flawlessly in orbit.