National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

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  • Saturn

    in space exploration, any of a series of large two- and three-stage vehicles for launching spacecraft, developed by the United States beginning in 1958 in connection with the manned Apollo Moon-landing program.

  • Wernher von Braun

    Wernher von Braun

    German engineer who led rocketry and space exploration, first in Germany and, after WWII, in the United States.

  • Sputnik

    Sputnik

    An artificial Earth satellite whose launch by the Soviet Union inaugurated the space age.

  • Sally Ride

    Sally Ride

    The first American woman to travel into outer space.

independent U.S. governmental agency established in 1958 for the research and development of vehicles and activities for the exploration of space within and outside of Earth's atmosphere.

The organization is composed of five program offices: Aeronautics and Space Technology, for the development of equipment; Space Science and Applications, dealing with programs for understanding the origin, structure, and evolution of the universe, the solar system, and the Earth; Space Flight, concerning manned and unmanned space transportation and all matters to do with the space shuttle; Space Tracking and Data, involving tracking and data acquisition; and Space Station, which has a long-term goal of establishing a manned space station. A number of additional research centres are affiliated, including the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.; the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas; and the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. Headquarters of NASA are in Washington, D.C.

NASA was created largely in response to the Soviet launching of Sputnik in 1957. It was organized around the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which had been created by Congress in 1915. NASA's organization was well underway by the early years of President John F. Kennedy's administration, when Kennedy proposed that the United States put a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s. To that end the Apollo program was designed, and in 1969 the U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man on the Moon. Later unmanned programs—such as Viking, Mariner, Voyager, and Galileo—explored other bodies of the solar system.

NASA was also responsible for the development and launching of a number of satellites with Earth applications, such as Landsat, a series of satellites designed to collect information on natural resources and other Earth features; communications satellites; and weather satellites. It also planned and developed the space shuttle, a reusable vehicle capable of carrying out missions that cannot be conducted with conventional spacecraft.

Copyright © 1994-2009 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. For more information visit Britannica.com.

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Feb 9

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Classroom Study Guides

  • Failure Is Not An Option (PDF)

    Curriculum guide to the program that tells the story of the men and women behind the space program.