NASA the HistoryNASA was created in 1958 largely as a response to the sense of emergency that arose from the Soviet Union’s launching of the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957.
What NASA a s an organization subsequently accomplished in ten short years –landing people on the moon – has few parallels in either the public or private sectors; it met the challenge issued by President Kennedy to win the race to the moon.
NASA began with about 4,000 employees, doubles by 1960 and reached a peak of 36,000 employees in 1966.
In the same period, NASA budget increased eightfold, peaking at about $5 billion dollars in 1965; this was 0.8 percent of the US gross national product for that year.
NASA was an expanded organization, building on the existing National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) – an agency with a long and positive record of foreign American aviation.
As a scientific and engineering institution, NACA had been very successful in aeronautics and was quietly but slow moving into the space exploration field prior to Sputnik’s launch.
NASA, a favorite agency of President John F. Kennedy – himself a near mythical hero to many American – NASA soon became an organization that could do no wrong.
With the Apollo escape program, NASA undertook to land humans on the surface of the moon and bring them back safely to earth, and it accomplished that mission on July 20, 1969.
The agency’s success in carrying out this extraordinary difficult task helped establish US technological superiority on a global scale and also garnered NASA wide admiration for its accomplishment.
In the 1970s and 1980s NASA focused on building frequently launchable and mostly reusable vehicles: the space shuttles. The first shuttle launched was Columbia, in April 1981.
NASA the History
