Aerotech News and Review, Oct 5 2018 - NASA Anniversary Special
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NASA: 60 years and counting
When NASA opened for business on Oct. 1, 1958, it accelerated the work already started on human and robotic spaceflight.
Forged in response to early Soviet space achievements, NASA was built on the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and other government organiza- tions, as the locus of U.S. civil aerospace research and development.
NASA’s first high profile program was Project Mercury, an effort to learn if humans could survive in space.
This was followed by Project Gemini, which used spacecraft built for two astronauts to perfect the capabilities needed for the national objective of a human trip to the Moon by the end of the 1960s. Project Apollo achieved that objective in July 1969 with the Apollo 11 mission, and expanded on it with five more successful lunar landing missions through 1972. After the Skylab and Apollo- Soyuz Test Projects of the mid-1970s, NASA’s human spaceflight efforts again resumed in 1981, with the Space Shuttle program, and continued for 30 years. The shuttle was not only a breakthrough in technology, but was essential to our next major step in space, the construction of the International Space Station.
Over the last 60 years NASA has continued to push the boundaries with cutting edge aeronautics research that has dramatically changed the way we build and fly airplanes. NASA has also completed the reconnaissance of our solar system, with intense investigation of all the planets. Using orbital spacecraft like the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA has also dramatically changed our understanding of the universe around us, as well as our own planet. NASA’s early work on launch vehicles, communication satellites, and weather satellites has fundamentally changed daily life and created whole new industries. As a catalyst for interna- tional cooperation, NASA has also changed how and why humanity conducts space exploration. Now, NASA is preparing to take humankind farther than ever before, as it helps to foster a robust commercial space economy near Earth, and pioneers further human and robotic exploration as we venture into deep space.
From 1946, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics had been ex- perimenting with rocket planes such as the supersonic Bell X-1.
After the Soviet launch of the world’s first artificial satellite (Sputnik 1) on Oct. 4, 1957, the attention of the United States turned toward its own fledgling space efforts. Congress, alarmed by the perceived threat to national security and technological leadership, urged swift and decisive action. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his advisers counseled more deliberate measures. On Jan. 12, 1958, NACA organized a “Special Committee on Space Technology”, headed by Guyford Stever. On Jan. 14, 1958, NACA Director Hugh Dryden published “A National Research Program for Space Technology” stating:
“It is of great urgency and importance to our country both from consider- ation of our prestige as a nation as well as military necessity that this challenge [Sputnik] be met by an energetic program of research and development for the conquest of space ... It is accordingly proposed that the scientific research be the responsibility of a national civilian agency ... NACA is capable, by rapid exten- sion and expansion of its effort, of providing leadership in space technology.”
While this new federal agency would conduct all non-military space activity, the Advanced Research Projects Agency was created in February 1958 to develop space technology for military application.
On July 29, 1958, Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, establishing NASA. When it began operations on Oct. 1, 1958, NASA absorbed the 43-year-old NACA intact; its 8,000 employees, an annual budget of $100 mil- lion, three major research laboratories (Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, Ames Aeronautical Laboratory, and Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory) and two small test facilities. A NASA seal was approved by President Eisenhower in 1959.
Elements of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and the United States Naval Research Laboratory were incorporated into NASA. A significant contributor to NASA’s entry into the Space Race with the Soviet Union was the technol- ogy from the German rocket program led by Wernher von Braun, who was now working for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency which, in turn, incorporated the technology of American scientist Robert Goddard’s earlier works. Earlier research efforts within the U.S. Air Force and many of ARPA’s early space programs were also transferred to NASA. In December 1958, NASA gained control of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a contractor facility operated by the California Institute of Technology.
See NASA, Page 2
October 5, 2018 • Volume 32, Issue 18 Serving the aerospace industry since 1986 Use your smartphone to connect to
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