San Diego Space Society

Happy Birthday, NASA!

Posted by Chris Radcliff in News on October 1, 2008

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was born fifty years ago today. Despite its ups and downs, the agency has had some extraordinary achievements. From the NASA History in Brief page:

Formed as a result of the Sputnik crisis of confidence, NASA inherited the earlier National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and other government organizations, and almost immediately began working on options for human space flight. NASA’s first high profile program was Project Mercury, an effort to learn if humans could survive in space, followed by Project Gemini, which built upon Mercury’s successes and used spacecraft built for two astronauts. NASA’s human space flight efforts then extended to the Moon with Project Apollo, culminating in 1969 when the Apollo 11 mission first put humans on the lunar surface. After the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz Test Projects of the early and mid-1970s, NASA’s human space flight efforts again resumed in 1981, with the Space Shuttle program that continues today to help build the International Space Station.

Here’s to another 50 years of progress. Happy Birthday, NASA!