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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which was established on July 29, 1958 by the National Aeronautics and Space Act,* 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. NASA is regarded as the forefront of space agencies worldwide.

History

Space Race

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 advisors 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 Dwight D. 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

The Apollo program was designed to land humans on the Moon and bring them safely back to Earth. Six of the missions (Apollos 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17) achieved this goal. Apollos 7 and 9 were Earth orbiting missions to test the Command and Lunar Modules, and did not return lunar data. Apollos 8 and 10 tested various components while orbiting the Moon, and returned photography of the lunar surface. Apollo 13 did not land on the Moon due to a malfunction, but also returned photographs. The six missions that landed on the Moon returned a wealth of scientific data and almost 400 kilograms of lunar samples. Experiments included soil mechanics, meteoroids, seismic, heat flow, lunar ranging, magnetic fields, and solar wind experiments.Chaikin, Andrew A Man On The Moon

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 Apollo 18 (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.Bernier, Serge (Stephen Lyle Translator) Space Odyssey: The First Forty Years of Space Exploration (Cambridge University Press, 2002) ISBN 0521813565

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 program 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 from 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 the European Space Agency (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.

NASA's shuttle program has made over 112 successful launches.

NASA's future

NASA's current investigations include in-depth surveys of Mars. The Mars Global Surveyor probe has been performing science in Mars orbit from 1997 to date. Since 2001, the orbiting Mars Odyssey has been searching for evidence of past or present water and volcanic activity on the red planet. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which reached Mars in 2006, will continue investigations of Martian climate and geology. The most spectacular missions, however, have been the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which have been traversing the surface of Mars at Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum since early 2004, returning thousands of images and other scientific data. NASA expects to continue to explore the Red Planet with more spacecraft such as Phoenix and the Mars Science Laboratory later this decade.

Other notable NASA missions include the Cassini probe, launched in 1997 and in orbit around Saturn since mid-2004, investigating Saturn and its inner satellites; and the New Horizons mission, launched 2006 and due to reach Pluto in 2015.

The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, which killed the crew of six Americans and one Israeli, caused a 29-month hiatus in space shuttle flights and 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 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 2018, 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 the 1970's 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, just now has been restored to a crew of three for the first time since it was cut to a skeleton crew of two in May 2003, causing many intended research projects to be delayed. However, Anatoli Perminov, director of Roskosmos, told Russian news agency Itar-Tass that from 2009 there would be six permanent crew members on board the station. Since the Columbia Shuttle accident, the permanent space station crew has comprised one Russian and one American, on board for six months at a time, meaning European and Japanese astronauts could not stay for longer missions. An increase in the number of crew members has been in the pipeline for some time but was delayed following the Columbia disaster in February 2003. 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.

NASA spaceflight missions

Human spaceflight

Robotic space missions

  • Proposed planetary-asteroid missions

List of NASA administrators

  1. T. Keith Glennan (1958–1961)
  2. James E. Webb (1961–1968)
  3. Thomas O. Paine (1969–1970)
  4. James C. Fletcher (1971–1977)
  5. Robert A. Frosch (1977–1981)
  6. James M. Beggs (1981–1985)
  7. James C. Fletcher (1986–1989)
  8. Richard H. Truly (1989–1992)
  9. Daniel S. Goldin (1992–2001)
  10. Sean O'Keefe (2001–2005)
  11. Michael D. Griffin (2005–)

Field installations

NASA's headquarters are located in Washington, DC.

NASA has field and research installations listed below by application. Some facilities serve more than one application due to historical or administrative reasons.

Research centers

Test facilities

Construction and launch facilities

Deep Space Network

Deep Space Network (DSN) stations
  1. Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, Barstow, California
  2. Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex, Madrid, Spain
  3. Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory

Tourism and 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

See also

Other space agencies

References

External links

General

Further research

NASA | Spacecraft propulsion | Rocketry | Rocket propulsion | Rocket engines | Independent Agencies of the United States Government | 4-letter acronyms | 1958 establishments

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