NASA Created — America Answers Sputnik
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration began operating on 1 October 1958, created by an act signed that July in direct response to Sputnik. The Soviet Union had orbited an 84-kilogram satellite on 4 October 1957 and a dog a month later, and the American answer, Vanguard, exploded on its pad in December in front of the press. The panic that followed was about missiles rather than science. A rocket that could put a satellite in orbit could deliver a warhead, and the launch demonstrated that the Soviet Union had one and the United States did not have a comparable one ready. Eisenhower's decision was to build the new agency on a civilian foundation. It absorbed the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics — a research body dating from 1915, with 8,000 staff and three laboratories — along with parts of the Naval Research Laboratory and, in 1960, the army rocket team under Wernher von Braun at Huntsville. Keeping it civilian and open was deliberate: it separated exploration from weapons in public, and it established the principle of overflight in space that reconnaissance satellites would depend on. Project Mercury was approved within a week of the agency opening. Gagarin flew in April 1961 and Kennedy committed the country to the Moon six weeks later, and the budget rose to over four per cent of federal spending. Apollo employed some 400,000 people across 20,000 contractors, and landed in July 1969. The Space Shuttle flew from 1981 to 2011, and the agency has had no vehicle of its own for astronauts since, buying seats from Russia and then from SpaceX.
- Year: 1958 CE
- Category: Technology
