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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which was established in 1958, is
the agency responsible for the public space program of the United States of America. It is also responsible for long-term civilian and military aerospace research.
 
Vision and mission
NASA's vision is "to improve life here, extend life to there, and to find life beyond". Its mission is "to
understand and protect our home planet; to explore the Universe and search for life; and to inspire the next generation of explorers".
History
Space Race
- Main article: Space Race
May 5, 1961 launch of Redstone rocket and NASA's Mercury 3 capsule Freedom 7 with Alan Shepard Jr. on the United States' first human flight into sub-orbital space. (Atlas rockets were used to launch Mercury's
orbital missions.)
Following the Soviet space program's launch of the world's first man-made satellite (Sputnik 1) on October 4, 1957, the attention of the United States turned toward its own fledgling space efforts. The U.S. Congress, alarmed by the perceived threat to U.S. security and technological leadership (known as "Sputnik Shock"),
urged immediate and swift action; President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his advisers counseled more deliberate measures. Several months of debate produced agreement that a new
federal agency was needed to conduct all nonmilitary activity in space.
On July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). When it began operations on October 1, 1958, NASA consisted mainly of the four laboratories and some 8,000 employees of the government's 46-year-old research
agency for aeronautics, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), though the probably most important contribution actually had its roots in the German rocket program led by Wernher von Braun, who is today regarded as the father of the United States space program. Elements of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (of which von Braun's team was a part) and the Naval Research Laboratory were incorporated into NASA.
NASA's early programs were research into human spaceflight, and were conducted under the pressure of the competition
between the USA and the USSR (the Space Race) that existed during the Cold War. The Mercury program, initiated in 1958, started NASA down the path of human space exploration with missions designed to discover
simply if man could survive in space. Representatives from the U.S. Army (M.L. Raines, LTC, USA), Navy (P.L. Havenstein, CDR, USN) and Air Force
(K.G. Lindell, COL, USAF) were selected/requested to provide assistance to the NASA Space Task Group through coordination
with the existing U.S. military research and defense contracting infrastructure, and technical assistance resulting from experimental
aircraft (and the associated military test pilot pool) development in the 1950s. On May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. became the first American in space when he piloted Freedom 7 on a 15-minute suborbital flight. John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962 during the 5-hour flight of Friendship 7.
Once the Mercury project proved that human spaceflight was possible, project Gemini was launched to conduct experiments and work out issues relating to a moon mission. The first Gemini flight
with astronauts on board, Gemini III, was flown by Virgil "Gus" Grissom and John W. Young on March 23, 1965. Nine other missions followed, showing that long-duration human space flight was possible, proving that rendezvous
and docking with another vehicle in space was possible, and gathering medical data on the effects of weightlessness on humans.
Apollo program
Following the success of the Mercury and Gemini programs, the Apollo program was launched to try to do interesting work in space and possibly put men around (but not on) the Moon. The direction of the Apollo program was radically altered following President John F. Kennedy's announcement on May 25, 1961 that the United States should commit itself to "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" by 1970. Thus Apollo became a program to land men on the Moon. The Gemini program was started shortly thereafter to provide an interim spacecraft to prove techniques needed for the now much
more complicated Apollo missions.
After eight years of preliminary missions, including NASA's first loss of astronauts with the Apollo 1 launch pad fire, and the first spacecraft to orbit the Moon (Apollo 8) at the end of 1968, the Apollo program achieved its goals with Apollo 11 which landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon's surface on July 20, 1969 and returned them to Earth safely on July 24. Armstrong's first words upon stepping out of the Eagle lander captured the momentousness of the occasion: "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind".
Twelve men would set foot on the Moon by the end of the Apollo program in December 1972.
NASA had won the moon race, and in some senses this left it without direction, or at the very least without
the public attention and interest that was necessary to guarantee large budgets from Congress. After President Lyndon Johnson left office, NASA lost its main political supporter, and rocket scientist Wernher von Braun was moved to a position lobbying in Washington. Plans for ambitious follow-on projects to construct a space
station, establish a lunar base and launch a human mission to Mars by 1990 were proposed but with the end to procurement of Saturn and Apollo hardware, there was no capability to support these. The near-disaster of Apollo 13, where an oxygen tank explosion nearly doomed all three astronauts, helped to recapture national attention and
concern. Although missions up to Apollo 20 were planned, Apollo 17 was the last mission to fly men to the moon. The program ended because of budget cuts (in part due to the Vietnam War) and the desire to develop a reusable space vehicle.
Other early missions
Although the vast majority of NASA's budget has been spent on human spaceflight, there have been many robotic
missions instigated by the space agency. In 1962 the Mariner 2 mission was launched and became the first spacecraft to make a flyby of another planet – in this case
Venus. The Ranger, Surveyor, and Lunar Orbiter missions were essential to assessing lunar conditions before attempting Apollo landings with humans on board.
Later, the two Viking probes landed on the surface of Mars and sent color images back to Earth, but perhaps more impressive were the Pioneer and particularly Voyager missions that visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune sending back scientific information and color images.
Having lost the moon race, the Soviet Union had, along with the USA, changed its approach. On July 17, 1975 an Apollo craft (finding a new use after the cancelling of planned lunar flights) was docked to the Soviet Soyuz 19 spacecraft, in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. Although the Cold War would last many more years, this was a critical point in NASA's history and much of the
international co-operation in space exploration that exists today has its genesis with this mission. America's first space
station, Skylab, occupied NASA from the end of Apollo until the late 1970s.
Shuttle era
The space shuttle became the major focus of NASA in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Planned to be a frequently launchable and mostly
reusable vehicle, four space shuttles were built by 1985. The first to launch, Columbia did so on April 12, 1981.
The shuttle was not all good news for NASA — flights were much more expensive than initially projected,
and even after the 1986 Challenger disaster highlighted the risks of space flight, the public again lost interest as missions appeared to become mundane.
Work began on Space Station Freedom as a focus for the manned space programme but within NASA there was argument that these projects came at the
expense of more inspiring unmanned missions such as the Voyager probes. The Challenger disaster aside the late 1980s marked a low point for NASA.
Nonetheless, the shuttle has been used to launch milestone projects like the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The HST was created with a relatively small budget of $2 billion but has continued operation since 1990
and has delighted both scientists and the public. Some of the images it has returned have become near-legendary, such as the
groundbreaking Hubble Deep Field images. The HST is a joint project between ESA and NASA, and its success has paved the way for greater collaboration between the agencies.
In 1995 Russian-American interaction would again be achieved as the Shuttle-Mir missions began, and once more a Russian craft (this time a full-fledged space station) docked with an American
vehicle. This cooperation continues to the present day, with Russia and America the two biggest partners in the largest space
station ever built – the International Space Station (ISS). The strength of their cooperation on this project was even more evident when NASA began relying on Russian
launch vehicles to service the ISS following the 2003 Columbia disaster, which grounded the shuttle fleet for well over two years.
Costing over one hundred billion dollars, it has been difficult at times for NASA to justify the ISS. The
population at large have historically been hard to impress with details of scientific experiments in space, preferring
news of grand projects to exotic locations. Even now, the ISS cannot accommodate as many scientists as planned.
During much of the 1990s, NASA was faced with shrinking annual budgets due to Congressional belt-tightening
in Washington, DC. In response, NASA's ninth administrator, Daniel S. Goldin, pioneered the "faster, better, cheaper" approach that enabled NASA to cut costs while still delivering a wide
variety of aerospace programs (Discovery Program). That method was criticized and re-evaluated following the twin losses of Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander in 1999.
With over 112 successful launches, NASA's shuttle program is arguably the best manned space program to date.
NASA's future
Left to Right: Saturn V, which last carried men to the moon, the Space Shuttle and the planned crew and heavy lift launch vehicles
NASA's most publicly-inspiring mission of recent years has probably been the Mars Pathfinder mission of 1997. Newspapers around the world carried images of the lander dispatching its own rover, Sojourner,
to explore the surface of Mars in a way never done before at any extra-terrestrial location. Less publicly acclaimed but performing
science from 1997 to date (2005) has been the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter. Since 2001, the orbiting Mars Odyssey has been searching for evidence of past or present water and volcanic activity on the red planet. NASA expects
to continue exploring the Red Planet with more spacecraft such as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which will reach Mars in 2006.
The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, which killed the crew of six American and one Israeli astronaut,
and caused a 29-month hiatus in space shuttle flights, triggered a serious re-examination of NASA's priorities. The U.S. government,
various scientists, and the public all considered the future of the space program.
On January 14, 2004, ten days after the landing of Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, President George W. Bush announced a new plan for NASA's future, dubbed the Vision for Space Exploration. According to this plan, humankind will return to the moon by 2020, and set up outposts as a testbed and potential
resource for future missions. The space shuttle will be retired in 2010 and the Crew Exploration Vehicle will replace it by 2014, capable of both docking with the ISS and leaving the Earth's orbit. The future of the
ISS is somewhat uncertain — construction will be completed, but beyond that is less clear. Although the plan initially
met with skepticism from Congress, in late 2004 Congress agreed to provide start-up funds for the first year's worth of the
new space vision.
Hoping to spur innovation from the private sector, NASA established a series of Centennial Challenges, technology prizes for non-government teams, in 2004. The Challenges include tasks that will be useful for implementing
the Vision for Space Exploration, such as building more efficient astronaut gloves.
Criticisms
Some commentators, such as Mark Wade, note that NASA has suffered from a 'stop-start' approach to its human
spaceflight programs. The Apollo spacecraft and Saturn family of launch vehicles were abandoned in 1970 after billions of
dollars had been spent on their development. In 2004 the U.S. Government proposed eventually replacing the Shuttle with a
Crew Exploration Vehicle that would allow the agency to again send astronauts to the Moon. Despite the reduction of its budget following
project Apollo, NASA has maintained a top-heavy bureaucracy resulting in inflated costs and compromised hardware.
Currently, the ISS relies on the Shuttle fleet for all major construction shipments. The Shuttle fleet has lost two spacecraft
and fourteen astronauts in two disasters in 1986 and 2003. While the 1986 loss was made up with a space shuttle built from replacement parts, NASA does not plan to build another shuttle to replace the second loss. (See also CEV.) The ISS, which was intended to have a crew of seven as of 2005, now has a skeleton crew of two, causing many intended research projects to be delayed. Other nations that have
invested heavily in the space station's construction, such as the members of the European Space Agency, are fearful that the ISS's fate will soon match the fate of Skylab. As of 2005, however, all of the European and Japanese contributions to the ISS are years behind development
schedule themselves.
NASA spaceflight missions
Human spaceflight
Robotic space missions
- Asteroidal/cometary missions
- Proposed or canceled planetary-asteroid missions
- Great Observatories for Space Astrophysics
List of NASA administrators
- T. Keith Glennan (1958–1961)
- James E. Webb (1961–1968)
- Thomas O. Paine (1969–1970)
- James C. Fletcher (1971–1977)
- Robert A. Frosch (1977–1981)
- James M. Beggs (1981–1985)
- James C. Fletcher (1986–1989)
- Richard H. Truly (1989–1992)
- Daniel S. Goldin (1992–2001)
- Sean O'Keefe (2001–2005)
- Michael D. Griffin (2005–)
Field installations
NASA's headquarters are located in Washington, DC.
NASA has field and research installations at (by type); some facilities have more than one mission assigned
to them due to historical or administrative reasons.
Research Centres
Test Facilities
- Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California
- Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, California
- John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field, Cleveland, Ohio
- Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
- Independent Verification and Validation Facility, Fairmont, West Virginia
- Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia
- Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Virginia
Construction & Launch Facilities
Deep Space Network
Deep Space Network (DSN) stations
- Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, Barstow, California
- Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex, Madrid, Spain
- Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory
There is a BOINC distributed computing project called "DSN @ Home" [1] that hopes to use DSN facilities to improve communication with craft in the Voyager program.
Tourism & Museum Facilities
Awards and decorations
NASA presently bestows a number of medals and decorations to astronauts and other NASA personnel. Some awards
are authorized for wear on active duty military uniforms. Current NASA awards are as follows:
Related legislation
- 1958 – National Aeronautics and Space Administration PL 85-568 (passed on July 29)
- 1961 – Apollo mission funding PL 87-98 A
- 1970 – National Aeronautics and Space Administration Research and Development Act PL 91-119
- 1984 – National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act PL 98-361
- 1988 – National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act PL 100-685
- NASA Budget 1958–2005 in 1996 Constant Year Dollars
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