On October 1st, 1958 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration officially commenced operations, just two months after then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the US National Aeronautics and Space Act into law.
NASA’s birth essentially arose out of what would become known as the “Sputnik crisis”. In October 1957 Russia launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite. Worse, just a month later, they launched Sputnik 2, which not only carried a living animal into orbit (the dog Laika, doomed to expire in orbit as the technology did not exist for the craft to re-enter the atmosphere and land safely), it demonstrated Russia had a launch system vehicle could be used relatively rapidly. This put US space launch efforts – activities largely split between the three branches of the military – into something of a tailspin, with the realisation that any civilian / science space programme could not be reliant on competing military programmes.
To this end, it was decided to place military space development under the auspices of a new agency within the US Department of Defense: the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA – now the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA), which was also charged with managing all aspects of emerging technologies research as they related to military use. Meanwhile, civilian space research would be placed in the hands of a new agency, with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) charged with coming up with a structure for that organisation.
Further haste was given to the need to determine the best direction of the US civilian space programme in May 1958, when Russia launched Sputnik-3 to mark the International Geophysical Year. Massing 1.3 tonnes, or 100 times that of the US satellite launched 3 months earlier with the same goal, Sputnik-3 demonstrated Russia had a payload to orbit capability well beyond anything within the United States, and a technical capability to fly large suites of science instruments on a single vehicle (12 instruments in the case of Sptnik-3).
In being instructed to study options for a new civilian space agency, the NACA was uniquely placed. Founded in 1915, it had (at that time) been at the forefront of aviation development in the United States for more than forty years, and following the end of the Second World War, it had become increasingly involved in aerospace research. For example, NACA was responsible for the initial design concept of what would become the X-15 hypersonic aircraft after developing and flying a number of supersonic craft during the early 1950s, and worked with the US Air Force to develop the vehicle from 1954 through until the establishment of NASA in October 1958.
After due consideration, NACA submitted a report and after reading it, James Killian, the then-chair of the Science Advisory Committee realised that NACA was not only well-placed to recommend what form the new space agency should take, it was ideally placed to become the foundation of the new organisation, informing Eisenhower via a memorandum the to Eisenhower stating the new agency should be formed out of a “strengthened and re-designated NACA, a going Federal research agency with 7,500 employees and $300 million worth of facilities” and which could expand its role “with a minimum of delay”. His suggestion was accepted and incorporated into the National Aeronautics and Space Act.
As a result of the decision to transition NACA into NASA, the new agency was able to hit the ground running, gaining three major research centres – Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, Ames Aeronautical Laboratory, and Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory, and the NACA budget and staff. In the months immediately following NASA’s establishment, those elements of the US Army and US Navy trying to build and operate orbital rocket systems were transitioned over to the new agency (including the US Army team utilising Wernher von Braun and other former German rocket engineers), together with the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which has become world-famous as the developmental and mission operations centre for the majority of NASA’s robotic deep space missions.
As a part of its very first research activities, NASA took over the hypersonic X-15 programme mentioned above, overseeing all 199 flights of that craft along with the US Air Force. At that time NASA came into existence, the NACA and the USAF had been collaborating on the idea of extending the X-15 into an orbit-capable vehicle to be launched vehicle a family of modified missiles, thus allowing the US to gain valuable insight into the design requirements and operating nature of space-capable aircraft, which were even at that time being seen as the future of manned spaceflight.
In particular, the USAF was keen to gather data to help with a concept for a multi-role “space glider” which would evolved into the X-20 Dyna-Soar project of the early 1960s (although this was ultimately cancelled in 1963). However, NASA’s new leadership preferred a more cautious approach to putting men in space, determining primates should be flown first and recovered for post-flight study. Therefore, the X-15B concept, with its need for a skilled pilot at the controls, was rules out in favour of the less capable but easier to fly Mercury capsule. Thus was NASA’s manned spaceflight programme born.
Today, whilst still a relatively small organisation in terms of manpower when it comes of federal agencies (the Federal Aviation Administration, for example, numbers 48,000 employees to NASA’s 18,000), and with a modest budget (less than US $26 billion from the US mandatory federal budget of US $4.1 trillion – which admittedly and conversely is still around 4.5 times more than the FAA’s), NASA is an incredibly diverse and far-reaching organisation.
Not only does it manage all of America’s civilian space activities through ten major research and operations centres across the United States (as well as numerous smaller facilities and centres), it continues to carry out wide-ranging aeronautical research and development in what is a continuance of the cutting-edge work started by the NACA more than 100 years ago.
In addition, NASA is involved in R&D and operations across many disciplines and areas of research, including communications; vehicle and transportation safety; environmental monitoring (climate and weather in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); pollution control, environmental management, global land use, deforestation monitoring, agricultural monitoring, etc (much in partnership with the US Geological Survey, or USGS); research into alterative and sustainable energy systems; nuclear research; multiple avenues of general science research as they pertain to the planet and to healthcare; and in promoting education, science, mathematics and the harnessing of technology through a range of STEM initiatives in the US and around the world.
So, happy anniversary NASA. You may be at retirement age in human terms – but here’s to many more!
Updates
OSIRIS-REx Samples
Previously on Space Sunday (as they say on TV shows) NASA’s ORISIS-REx mission returned to Earth samples captured from 101955 Bennu, a carbonaceous near-Earth asteroid. As we left that story, the sealed capsule containing the estimated 250 grams of material was pending a transfer to NASA’s Johnson Space Centre (JSC), Texas.
That transfer occurred on Tuesday, September 26th, 2023, with the sample capsule being airlifted from the US Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, some 31 kilometres from where it landed, to Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base near Houston, Texas. From here the special transpiration container with the capsule inside was move by road to the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) centre at JSC.
ARES is home to the world’s largest collection of “astromaterials” (samples returned from space), and is usually the first US centre to examine such samples brought to Earth by US space missions. As such, it is the ideal permanent home for the OSIRIS-REx samples, and will be the centre that carries out an initial sample analysis and then divvy it up for distribution to research centres around the world and to museums.
How it should have gone – the OSIRIS-REx TAGSAM “touch-and-go” mechanism recovering samples from the surface of asteroid 101955 Bennu in 2020. As it turned out, the asteroid’s surface was so brittle, the sample head and arm smashed through it to a depth of around 50cm.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 