History
Space race
After the
Soviet space program's launch of the world's first human-made
satellite (
Sputnik 1) on October 4, 1957, the attention of the United States turned toward its own fledgling space efforts. The
U.S. Congress, alarmed by the perceived threat to U.S. security and technological leadership (known as the "
Sputnik crisis"), urged immediate and swift action; President
Dwight D. Eisenhower and his advisers counseled more deliberate measures. Several months of debate produced an agreement that a new federal agency was needed to conduct all non-military activity in space. The
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was also created at this time.
NACA
Official seal for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
From late 1957 to early 1958, the
National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) began studying what a new non-military space agency would entail, as well as what its role might be, and assigned several committees to review the concept.
[4] On January 12, 1958, NACA organized a "Special Committee on Space Technology", headed by
Guyford Stever.
[4] Stever's committee included consultation from the
ABMA's large booster program, referred to as the "Working Group on Vehicular Program," headed by
Wernher von Braun,
[4] who became a
naturalized citizen of the United States after
World War II.
On January 14, 1958, NACA Director
Hugh Dryden published "A National Research Program for Space Technology" stating:
[12]
| “ | It is of great urgency and importance to our country both from consideration 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 extension and expansion of its effort, of providing leadership in space technology.[12] | ” |
Launched at 10:48 pm EST on January 31, 1958,
Explorer 1, officially Satellite 1958 Alpha, became the U.S.'s first artificial satellite of
Earth.
[13] The Explorer 1 payload consisted of the
Iowa Cosmic Ray Instrument without a tape data recorder which was not modified in time to make it onto the satellite.
On March 5,
PSAC Chairman
James Killian wrote a memorandum to President Eisenhower, entitled "Organization for Civil Space Programs", encouraging the creation of a civil space program based upon a "strengthened and redesignated" NACA which could expand its research program "with a minimum of delay."
[12]In late March, a NACA report entitled "Suggestions for a Space Program" included recommendations for subsequently developing a hydrogen fluorine fueled
rocket of 4,450,000 newtons (1,000,000 lb
f) thrust designed with second and third stages.
[4]In April 1958, President Eisenhower delivered to the U.S. Congress a formal executive address favoring the notion of a national civilian space agency and submitted an Administrative bill to create a "National Aeronautical and Space Agency."
[4] NACA's former role of research alone would change to include large-scale development, management, and operations.
[4] The U.S. Congress passed the bill, somewhat reworded, as the
National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, on July 16.
[4] Only two days later von Braun's Working Group submitted a preliminary report severely criticizing the duplication of efforts and lack of coordination among various organizations assigned to the United States' space programs.
[4] Stever's Committee on Space Technology concurred with the criticisms of the von Braun Group (a final draft was published several months later, in October).
[4]NASA
On July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower signed the
National Aeronautics and Space Act, establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. When it began operations on October 1, 1958, NASA absorbed the 46-year-old NACA intact; its 8,000 employees, an annual budget of US$100 million, three major research laboratories (
Langley Aeronautical Laboratory,
Ames Aeronautical Laboratory, and
Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory) and two small test facilities.
[14]Manned programs
Project Mercury
NASA's earliest programs involved research into
human spaceflight and were conducted under the pressure of the competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that existed during the
Cold War.
Project Mercury, initiated in 1958, started NASA down the path of human space exploration with missions designed to discover simply if man could survive in
space. Representatives from the U.S. Army (M.L. Raines, LTC, USA), Navy (P.L. Havenstein, CDR, USN), and Air Force (K.G. Lindell, COL, USAF) were selected to provide assistance to NASA. Selections were facilitated through coordination with existing U.S. defense research, contracting, and military test pilot programs. On May 5, 1961, astronaut
Alan Shepard—one of the seven Project Mercury
astronauts selected as pilot for this mission—became the first American in space when he piloted
Freedom 7 on a 15-minute suborbital flight.
[17] John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962 during the five and a quarter-hour flight of
Friendship 7.
[18]Project Gemini
Main article:
Project GeminiAfter the Mercury project,
Project Gemini was launched to conduct experiments and work out issues relating to a moon mission. The first Gemini flight with astronauts on board,
Gemini 3, was flown by
Gus Grissom and
John Young on March 23, 1965.
[19]Nine other missions followed, showing that long-duration human space flight was possible, proving that rendezvous and docking with another vehicle in space was possible, and gathering medical data on the effects of weightlessness on human beings.
[20][21] During this time NASA also began to explore the solar system with unmanned probes. As with the manned program, the Soviets had the first successes,
[22] such as the first photographs of the lunar far side,
[22] but NASA's
Mariner 2 was the first space probe to visit another planet, Venus, in 1962.
[23]
The Apollo 11 Saturn V space vehicle lifts off.
Apollo program
Main article:
Apollo program
Apollo 11 pilot Buzz Aldrin salutes US flag.
The program was accomplished with only two major setbacks. The first was the
Apollo 1 launchpad fire that resulted in the deaths of astronauts
Gus Grissom,
Ed White and
Roger Chaffee. The second was an explosion on
Apollo 13 during the moonward leg of its journey, which badly damaged the spacecraft. The three astronauts aboard narrowly escaped with their lives, thanks to the efforts of flight controllers, project engineers, backup crew members and the skills of the astronauts themselves.
Apollo set major
milestones in human spaceflight. It stands alone in sending manned missions beyond
low Earth orbit;
Apollo 8 was the first manned spacecraft to orbit another celestial body, while
Apollo 17 marked the last moonwalk and the last manned mission beyond
low Earth orbit. The program spurred advances in many areas of technology peripheral to rocketry and manned spaceflight, including
avionics,
telecommunications, and
computers. Apollo sparked interest in many fields of
engineering and left many physical facilities and machines developed for the program as landmarks. Many objects and artifacts from the program are on display at various locations throughout the world, notably at the
Smithsonian's Air and Space Museums.
NASA's Skylab Space Station
Skylab
Skylab was the first
space station the United States launched into orbit.
[27] The 100 short tons (91 t) station was in Earth orbit from 1973 to 1979, and was visited by crews three times, in 1973 and 1974.
[27] It included a laboratory for studying the effects of
microgravity, and a
solar observatory.
[27] A Space Shuttle was planned to dock with and elevate Skylab to a higher safe altitude, but Skylab reentered the atmosphere and was destroyed in 1979, before the first shuttle could be launched.
[28] Skylab was abandoned after SL-4 in February 1974 and increased solar activity caused excessive drag which led to an early reentry. Skylab's reentry occurred at approximately 16:37 UTC July 11, 1979, landing over parts of Western Australia and the Indian Ocean, with some fragments being recovered.
[29]Space Shuttle
Main article:
Space ShuttleThe
Space Shuttle became the major focus of NASA in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Planned to be a frequently launchable and mostly reusable vehicle, four space shuttles were built by 1985. The first to launch,
Columbia, did so on April 12, 1981.
[30]The shuttle was not all good news for NASA: flights were much more expensive than initially projected, and the public again lost interest as missions appeared to become mundane until the 1986
Challenger disaster again highlighted the risks of space flight. Work began on
Space Station Freedom as a focus for the manned space program, but within NASA there was argument that these projects came at the expense of more inspiring unmanned missions such as the
Voyager probes.
[30]
The NASA "worm" logo used from 1975 to 1992.
In 1995 Russian-American interaction resumed with the
Shuttle-Mir missions. Once more an American vehicle docked with a Russian craft, this time a full-fledged space station. This cooperation continues to today, with Russia and America the two biggest partners in the largest space station ever built: the
International Space Station (ISS). The strength of their cooperation on this project was even more evident when NASA began relying on Russian launch vehicles to service the ISS during the two year grounding of the shuttle fleet following the 2003
Space ShuttleColumbia disaster.
The Shuttle fleet lost two spacecraft and fourteen astronauts in two disasters:
Challenger in 1986, and
Columbia in 2003.
[31] While the 1986 loss was mitigated by building the
Space Shuttle Endeavour from replacement parts, NASA has no plans to build another shuttle to replace the
second loss, and instead may be transitioning to a new spacecraft called
Orion.
[31]NASA's shuttle program had made 120 successful launches as of September 2009.
International Space Station
The
International Space Station (
ISS) is an internationally developed research facility
currently being assembled in
Low Earth Orbit. On-orbit construction of the station began in 1998 and is scheduled to be completed by 2011, with operations continuing until at least 2015.
[32] The station can be seen from the Earth with the naked eye, and, as of 2009, is the largest artificial satellite in
Earth orbit, with a mass larger than that of any previous
space station.
The cost of the station project has been estimated by ESA as €100 billion over a course of 30 years, although cost estimates vary between 35 billion dollars and 160 billion dollars, making the ISS the
most expensive object ever constructed.
Unmanned programs
Mariner program
The
Mariner program was a program conducted by
NASA that launched a series of
robotic interplanetary probes designed to investigate
Mars,
Venus and
Mercury. The program included a number of firsts, including the first planetary flyby, the first pictures from another planet, the first planetary
orbiter, and the first
gravity assist maneuver.
Pioneer program
The
Pioneer program is a series of
NASA unmanned space missions that was designed for planetary exploration. There were a number of such missions in the program, but the most notable were
Pioneer 10 and
Pioneer 11, which explored the outer planets and left the
solar system. Both carry a golden
plaque, depicting a man and a woman and information about the origin and the creators of the probes, should any
extraterrestrials find them someday.
Additionally, the
Pioneer mission to
Venus consisted of two components, launched separately. Pioneer Venus 1 or
Pioneer Venus Orbiter was launched in 1978 and studied the planet for more than a decade after orbital insertion in 1978. Pioneer Venus 2 or
Pioneer Venus Multiprobe sent four small probes into the Venusian atmosphere.
Voyager program
The
Voyager program is a series of NASA
unmanned space missions that consists of a pair of unmanned scientific
probes,
Voyager 1 and
Voyager 2. They were launched in 1977 to take advantage of a favorable planetary alignment of the late 1970s. Although they were officially designated to study just
Jupiter and
Saturn, the two probes were able to continue their mission into the
outer solar system. Both probes have achieved escape velocity from the solar system and will never return. Both missions have gathered large amounts of data about the
gas giants of the
solar system, of which little was previously known.
Voyager 1 is currently the farthest human-made object from
Earth at about 110.94
AU (16.596
billion km, or 10.312 billion miles), traveling away from both the Earth and the
Sun at a speed of 17 km/s, which corresponds to a greater
specific orbital energy than any other probe.
[33] 
Full-scale model of the Viking Lander
Viking program
Main article:
Viking programThe
Viking program consisted of a pair of space probes sent to
Mars,
Viking 1 and
Viking 2. Each vehicle was composed of two main parts, an orbiter designed to
photograph the surface of Mars from
orbit, and a lander designed to study the planet from the surface. The orbiters also served as communication relays for the landers once they touched down. Viking 1 was
launched on August 20, 1975, and the second craft, Viking 2, was launched on September 9, 1975, both riding atop
Titan III-E rockets with
Centaur upper stages. By discovering many geological forms that are typically formed from large amounts of water, the Viking program caused a revolution in scientific ideas about water on Mars.
The primary objectives of the Viking orbiters were to transport the landers to Mars, perform reconnaissance to locate and certify landing sites, act as a communications relays for the landers, and to perform their own scientific investigations. The orbiter, based on the earlier
Mariner 9 spacecraft, was an
octagon approximately 2.5 m across. The total launch mass was 2328 kg, of which 1445 kg were propellant and attitude control gas.
Hubble Space Telescope
The HST was created with a relatively small budget of $2 billion
[35] and has continued operation since 1990, delighting both scientists and the public. Some of its images, such as the groundbreaking
Hubble Deep Field, have become famous.
The Magellan Probe prepared for launch
Magellan Probe
Main article:
Magellan probeThe
Magellan spacecraft was a
space probe sent to the planet
Venus, the first unmanned interplanetary spacecraft to be launched by
NASA since its successful
Pioneer Orbiter, also to Venus, in 1978. It was also the first of three deep-space probes to be launched on the
Space Shuttle, and the first spacecraft to employ
aerobraking techniques to lower its orbit.
Magellan created the first (and currently the best) high resolution mapping of the planet's surface features. Prior Venus missions had created low resolution radar globes of general, continent-sized formations. Magellan, performed detailed imaging and analysis of craters, hills, ridges, and other geologic formations, to a degree comparable to the visible-light photographic mapping of other planets.
Galileo Probe
Main article:
Galileo ProbeDespite antenna problems,
Galileo conducted the first
asteroid flyby, discovered the first
asteroid moon, was the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter, and launched the first probe into Jupiter's
atmosphere. Galileo's prime mission was a two-year study of the Jovian system. The spacecraft traveled around Jupiter in elongated
ellipses, each orbit lasting about two months. The differing distances from Jupiter afforded by these orbits allowed
Galileo to sample different parts of the planet's extensive
magnetosphere. The orbits were designed for close up flybys of Jupiter's largest moons. Once Galileo's prime mission was concluded, an extended mission followed starting on December 7, 1997; the spacecraft made a number of daring close flybys of Jupiter's moons
Europa and
Io. The closest approach was 180 km (112 mi) on October 15, 2001.
On September 21, 2003, after 14 years in space and 8 years of service in the
Jovian system,
Galileo′s mission was terminated by sending the orbiter into Jupiter's atmosphere at a speed of nearly 50 kilometers per second to avoid any chance of it contaminating local moons with
bacteria from
Earth. Of particular concern was the
ice-crusted moon
Europa, which, thanks to
Galileo, scientists now suspect harbors a salt water
ocean beneath its surface.
The Soujourner rover on Mars
Mars Pathfinder
This mission, besides being the first of a series of missions to
Mars that included rovers (robotic exploration vehicles), was the most important since the
Vikings landed on the red planet in 1976, and also was the first successful mission to send a rover to a
planet. In addition to scientific objectives, the Mars Pathfinder mission was also a "proof-of-concept" for various technologies, such as
airbag-mediated touchdown and automated obstacle avoidance, both later exploited by the
Mars Exploration Rovers. The Mars Pathfinder was also remarkable for its extremely low price relative to other unmanned space missions to Mars.
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