National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA emerged in 1958 at the height of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.In the field of space exploration, the Soviets scored a dramatic coup on 4 October 1957, when they launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, as part of a larger scientific effort associated with the International Geophysical Year. Concerned about the perception that the United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in technology, Congress established NASA to explore and use space for the benefit “of all mankind.”

The new agency's space missions began with Project Mercury to study the possibilities of human space flight. The efforts expanded significantly in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy, responding to perceived challenges to U.S. leadership in science and technology, announced Project Apollo, whose goal was to place an American on the moon by 1970. For the next eleven years this project consumed NASA's energies. Between 1969 and 1972 NASA landed six teams of astronauts on the moon. The first landing mission, Apollo II, achieved success on 20 July 1969, when astronaut Neil Armstrong (1930– )first set foot on the lunar surface, proclaiming to millions of listeners: “That's one small step for [a] man—one giant leap for mankind.” Subsequent landings, coming at approximately six‐month intervals thereafter, spent more time on the moon and conducted more sophisticated experiments.

NASA went into a holding pattern after Project Apollo. The reusable space shuttle, its major program of the 1970s, first flew in 1981 and by the end of 1985 had made twenty‐four flights. During the launch of Challenger on 28 January 1986, however, a leak in the joints of a solid rocket booster detonated the main fuel tank. Six astronauts and high‐school social studies teacher Christa McAuliffe died in this accident, the worst in NASA's history. Following the Challenger disaster, the shuttle program experienced a two‐year hiatus, while NASA redesigned the system and revamped its management structure. Space shuttle flights resumed on 29 September 1988. Over the next decade, NASA launched more than seventy accident‐free shuttle missions. In November 1998, seventy‐seven‐year‐old John H. Glenn Jr. returned to space for a ten‐day mission in the shuttle Discovery, thirty‐six years after he flew a mission in Project Mercury in 1962.

In addition to the human space‐flight programs, scientific probes were sent to the moon and planets, particularly Mars. The space vehicle Viking landed on Mars in 1976; the Mars Pathfinder in 1997. The Voyager mission to the outer solar system in the 1970s and early 1980s provided stunning images and data about distant planets and their moons. In the 1990s the Hubble space telescope, initially impaired, began returning exceptional scientific data about the origins and development of the universe; the Magellan mission radar‐imaged Venus; and the Galileo probe to Jupiter generated important scientific data.

The effort to develop an international space station, inaugurated in the 1980s with the launch of the first components in 1998, promised a future presence in space and the possibility of renewed exploration of the moon and nearby planets. At the same time, the high cost of space exploration dampened the enthusiasm of some members of Congress, which provided the funding. From the beginning, some critics had argued that NASA's budget might be better spent on social needs at home, but this remained a minority view, as the romance of space continued to exert its allure.

NASA experienced both tragedy and triumph in the early twenty‐first century. In February 2003, insulation tiles broke loose from the space shuttle Columbia on launch, damaging a wing. The shuttle ignited and disintegrated on re-entry, killing the seven‐member crew. Early in 2004, by contrast, NASA landed two unmanned exploratory vehicles on Mars that sent back spectacular photographs and gathered important scientific data. But the problem‐plagued agency continued to operate under tight budget constraints, and its long‐term future remained uncertain.
See also Science: Since 1945; Space Program.

Bibliography

Walter A. McDougall , The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, 1985.
Roger D. Launius , NASA: A History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, 1994.

Roger D. Launius

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Paul S. Boyer