NASA

NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), was established on March 3, 1915 to coordinate the nation’s aeronautical research; for more than 40 years it was the country’s premier aeronautical research institution, opening laboratories such as Langley and Ames.⁠[1]

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1, setting off new political, military, technological and scientific developments; the United States successfully launched Explorer 1 on January 31, 1958. The Sputnik launch led directly to the creation of NASA.⁠[2]

On July 29, 1958, the President signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 (Public Law 85-568). The Act declared that “activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes,” established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration headed by an Administrator, and provided that NACA would cease to exist, its functions, property, personnel and funds passing to the new agency.⁠[3]

Built on NACA, NASA opened for business on October 1, 1958.⁠[4]

NACA’s 7,500 employees and $300 million in facilities transferred to the new agency that day.⁠[1]

The same day, NACA’s Lewis laboratory in Cleveland became part of NASA; Abe Silverstein, who had moved from the laboratory to headquarters that spring to help plan the agency’s early programs, named the Mercury and Apollo programs.⁠[5]

T. Keith Glennan served as NASA’s first Administrator from August 19, 1958 to January 20, 1961.⁠[6]

In 1959, NASA employee James Modarelli designed the round red, white and blue insignia nicknamed the “meatball,” whose elements represent a planet, stars, space travel and aeronautics. In 1975 NASA adopted a more modern logotype nicknamed the “worm,” which was retired in 1992.⁠[7]

Project Mercury was the first U.S. human spaceflight program. NASA selected the Mercury Seven astronauts in April 1959; on May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard made the first American crewed suborbital flight in Freedom 7; on February 20, 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth; and on May 15, 1963, Gordon Cooper flew Faith 7, the program’s final mission and the sixth crewed flight.⁠[8]

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy addressed a joint session of Congress and proposed, before the decade was out, “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”⁠[9]

Project Gemini bridged Mercury and Apollo, testing equipment and mission procedures in Earth orbit and training crews for Apollo. During Gemini IV, flown June 3–7, 1965, Ed White made the first spacewalk by an American astronaut; Gemini 8 achieved the first docking in space, with an Agena; Gemini 12 was the tenth and final crewed flight.⁠[10]

On January 27, 1967, fire swept through the command module during a preflight test for Apollo 204 on the launch pad at Cape Kennedy, killing astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee. The command modules were investigated and redesigned, and Saturn IB schedules were suspended for nearly a year.⁠[11]

Apollo 11 launched on July 16, 1969 with Neil Armstrong, Buzz AldrinBuzz AldrinBuzz Aldrin is a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and former NASA astronaut who performed three extravehicular activities on Gemini XII in 1966 and, as Apollo 11 lunar module pilot in 1969, became the second person to walk on the Moon.Open the full entry and Michael Collins; on July 20 the lunar module Eagle landed and Armstrong took humanity’s first steps on the Moon; the crew splashed down on July 24.⁠[12]

Apollo 13 launched on April 11, 1970 with James Lovell, John Swigert and Fred Haise; during the mission the crew radioed “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” and they splashed down on April 17.⁠[13]

Apollo 17, launched on December 7, 1972, was the Apollo Program’s last lunar landing mission, with Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt and Ronald Evans; Schmitt was the twelfth person to set foot on the Moon, and the mission splashed down on December 19.⁠[14]

The Apollo Program (1962–1972) carried out six lunar landing missions, using the Saturn V for lunar flights.⁠[15]

Skylab, America’s first space station, launched on May 14, 1973, hosted three crews (Skylab 2, 3 and 4) that studied Earth from orbit, and was deorbited on July 11, 1979.⁠[16]

The Apollo spacecraft launched on July 15, 1975 docked on July 17 with a Soyuz carrying two Soviet cosmonauts; the U.S. crew was Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand and Donald Slayton, and the Soviet crew Aleksey Leonov and Valeriy Kubasov. It was the first international partnership in orbit and paved the way for later ones.⁠[17]

Viking 1, launched on August 20, 1975, landed on Mars on July 20, 1976, the first U.S. mission to land safely on the Martian surface; Viking 2 launched on September 9, 1975. The Viking 1 lander made its final transmission to Earth in November 1982.⁠[18]

The twin Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 made the first in-depth reconnaissance of the outer planets; Voyager 1 reached the interstellar boundary in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018. The contents of their golden record were selected by a committee led by Carl Sagan.⁠[19]

The Space Shuttle first launched on April 12, 1981; the orbiters Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour flew 135 missions over 30 years carrying 852 shuttle fliers, and the final mission, STS-135, ended on July 21, 2011.⁠[20]

On January 28, 1986, Challenger exploded 73 seconds into STS-51L, killing Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe of the “Teacher in Space” project; a presidential commission issued its report in June 1986.⁠[21]

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990 aboard Discovery’s STS-31 mission; its primary mirror was then found to have spherical aberration, and the first servicing mission, December 2–13, 1993, installed corrective instruments. Hubble received five servicing missions, the last in May 2009.⁠[22]

Elements of the International Space Station began launching in 1998, and the Expedition 1 crew docked on November 2, 2000, beginning continuous habitation. The station is operated by the Canadian Space Agency, the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, NASA and Roscosmos, has hosted more than 290 people from 26 countries, and is to remain in use until at least 2030.⁠[23]

Columbia, launched on STS-107 on January 16, 2003, was lost in the February 1, 2003 accident, killing Rick Husband, William McCool, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark, Michael Anderson and payload specialist Ilan Ramon; the Columbia Accident Investigation Board investigated.⁠[24]

New Horizons launched on January 19, 2006, flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, and flew past Arrokoth on January 1, 2019.⁠[25]

The Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity launched on November 26, 2011 and landed in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012, with the goal of determining whether Mars was ever able to support microbial life.⁠[26]

On May 30, 2020, NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley lifted off in a SpaceXSpaceXSpaceX is a company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 whose businesses include space transportation, Starlink satellite communications and artificial intelligence. It went public in 2026 under the ticker SPCX.Open the full entry Crew Dragon from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, the first time NASA astronauts launched from American soil on a commercially built and operated American crew spacecraft and the first U.S. crewed launch since the Space Shuttle Program ended in 2011.⁠[27]

On June 24, 2020, NASA announced that its headquarters building in Washington, D.C. would be named for Mary W. Jackson, the agency’s first African American female engineer; the building stands on Hidden Figures Way, renamed in 2019.⁠[28]

The Perseverance rover launched on July 30, 2020 and landed in Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021, with objectives including collecting and caching rock samples; its companion helicopter Ingenuity made 72 flights, the first aircraft to achieve powered, controlled flight on another planet.⁠[29]

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft launched on a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg on November 24, 2021 and on September 26, 2022 struck Dimorphos, a moonlet orbiting Didymos, successfully altering its orbit in NASA’s first successful planetary defense test.⁠[30]

The James Webb Space Telescope, a joint NASA/ESA/CSA mission, launched on December 25, 2021 and released its first science images in July 2022 after commissioning.⁠[31]

Artemis I launched an uncrewed Orion spacecraft on the Space Launch System on November 16, 2022 for a lunar flight test lasting 25 days, 10 hours and 53 minutes, splashing down on December 11.⁠[32]

Europa Clipper launched on October 14, 2024 and is due to reach Jupiter in April 2030 to determine whether Jupiter’s moon Europa currently has habitable conditions.⁠[33]

Bill Nelson served as Administrator from May 3, 2021 to January 20, 2025; Janet Petro was then acting Administrator from January 20 to July 9, 2025, followed by Sean Duffy as acting Administrator from July 9 to December 18.⁠[6]

The fiscal 2026 budget request presented in May 2025 proposed $18,809.1 million for NASA against $24,838.3 million enacted for fiscal 2025, cut science from $7,334.2 million to $3,907.6 million, and proposed ending SLS and Orion after Artemis III, cancelling the U.S. Gateway elements and cancelling Mars Sample Return.⁠[34]

In July 2025, nearly 4,000 NASA employees, about 20% of the workforce, opted to leave through the deferred resignation program; NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner said that, with about 500 departures through normal attrition, staff would fall from about 18,000 to about 14,000.⁠[35]

President Donald Trump nominated Jared Isaacman as NASA Administrator on November 4, 2025, and the Senate confirmed him on December 17, making him the agency’s 15th Administrator. Isaacman founded United Bank Card, later renamed Shift4, commanded Inspiration4, the first all-civilian orbital flight, in 2021, and led the Polaris Dawn mission, which made the first commercial spacewalk, in 2024.⁠[36]

The House and Senate passed the fiscal 2026 spending bills on January 8 and January 15, 2026, and the President signed them on January 23; they fund NASA at $24.4 billion, including $7.25 billion for the Science Mission Directorate, a 1.1% cut compared with the 47% cut proposed in the budget request.⁠[37]

Artemis II launched from Kennedy Space Center on April 1, 2026 with NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen; the first crewed Artemis flight lasted 9 days, 1 hour and 32 minutes and splashed down on April 10.⁠[38]

NASA states its mission as exploring the unknown in air and space, innovating for the benefit of humanity and inspiring the world through discovery; it has 20 centers and facilities across the country, with headquarters in Washington, D.C.⁠[39]

In fiscal 2025, the total funds available to NASA were $41.5 billion, and its civil service workforce, counted by center, totaled 17,438 employees.⁠[40]

NASA: Official website: https://www.nasa.gov/ (opens in a new window)⁠[39]

X: Official account: https://x.com/NASA (opens in a new window)⁠[39]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Official account: https://www.youtube.com/@NASA (opens in a new window)⁠[39]