NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the government agency responsible for the United States of America's space program and long-term general aerospace research. A civilian organization, it conducts (or oversees) research into both civilian and military aerospace systems.
| Table of contents |
|
2 History 3 NASA space missions 4 Field installations 5 Related legislation 6 See also 7 External links |
Vision and Mission
NASA has distilled its official vision and mission into simple lists. Its vision is:- To improve life here,
- To extend life to there, and
- To find life beyond.
- To understand and protect our home planet;
- To explore the Universe and search for life; and
- To inspire the next generation of explorers.
History
NASA's early priorities were geared towards human space flight, and the pace and pressure continually escalated because of the competitive nature (the Space Race) that existed during the Cold War. The Mercury program, initiated in 1958, began NASA down the path of human exploration in earnest with missions designed to discover how man could be supported and functional off the surface of the Earth. The Gemini program continued this aim, but it was the Apollo program, begun in 1961, that captured the hearts of many Americans and citizens worldwide. The project begun after President Kennedy announced in 1961 on May 25 that the USA should commit itself to "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely" by 1970.
After eight years of missions designed to provide the framework for the ultimate mission, including NASA's first loss of astronauts with the Apollo 1 launch pad fire, the Apollo program achieved its goals with Apollo 11 which landed men on the moon's surface on July 20, 1969 and returned them to Earth safely on July 24.
NASA had won the space race, and in some senses this left it without direction, or at the very least without the public attention and interest that was necessary to guarantee large budgets from congress. The near-disaster of Apollo 13, where a fuel tank explosion nearly doomed all three astronauts helped to recapture interest and concern, but although missions up to Apollo 20 were planned, Apollo 17 was the last mission to fly under the Apollo banner. Budget cuts (in part due to the Vietnam War brought about the end of the program, as did a desire to develop a reusable space vehicle.
Although the vast majority of NASA budgets were spent on human spaceflight there were many unmanned scientific missions instigated by the space agency. In 1962 the Mariner 2 mission was launched and became the first spacecraft to make a flyby of another planet – in this case Venus. Later the Viking program landed on the surface of Mars and sent colour images back to Earth, but perhaps more impressive were the Pioneer and particularly Voyager missions that visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and sent back science and color images from all.
Having lost the space race the Soviet Union had, along with the USA, a change in approach. On July 17, 1975 an Apollo craft (finding a new use after the cancellation of Apollo 18) was docked to the Soviet Soyuz 19 space craft. Although the cold war would last many more years this was a critical point in NASA's history and much of the international co-operation in space exploration that exists today has its genesis here.
The space shuttle became the major focus of NASA in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Planned to be a frequently launchable and mostly reusable (the largest fuel tank is not re-used) vehicle and four were built by 1985. The first to launch, Challenger did so on April 12, 1981, and again captured the public's imagination with its futuristic design and reusable aspects.
The shuttle was not all good news for NASA – flights are several magnitudes more expensive than initially projected, and even after the Challenger disaster highlighted the risks of space flight, the public again lost interest as missions appeared to become mundane.
Nonetheless, the shuttle achieved many notable moments, and has been used to launch milestone projects like the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The HST was created with a relatively small budget of $2 billion but has continued operation since 1990 and has delighted both scientists and the public. Some of the images it has returned have become near-legendary, such as the groundbreaking Hubble Deep Field images. The HST is a joint project between ESA and NASA and its success has paved the way for greatere collaboration between the agencies.
In 1995 Russian-American interaction would again be a sign of things to come as the Shuttle-Mir missions began, and once more a Russian craft (this time a full-fledged space station) docked with an American vehicle. This co-operation continues to the present day, with Russian and America the two biggest partners in the largest space station ever built – the International Space Station (ISS). In fact, as of January 2004, NASA is unable to send astronauts to the station without relying on Russian launch vehicles.
Costing over one hundred billion dollars, it has been difficult at times for NASA to justify the ISS. The population at large have historically been hard to impress with details of scientific experiments in space, preferring news of grand projects to exotic locations. No-one will argue the status of the ISS as the premier human facility for science off the Earth's surface that has ever been built, but even now it cannot accommodate as many scientists as planned, especially with the space shuttle out of use until September 2004 at the earliest, bringing expansion to a halt and forcing a two man crew.
Probably the most publicly-inspiring mission of recent years has been the Mars Pathfinder mission of 1996. Newspapers around the world carried images of the lander dispatching its own rover, Sojourner to explore the surface of Mars in a way never done before on any extra-terrestrial location. It is perhaps unsurprising that this mission and the Apollo missions should lay the foundations for NASA's new direction announced on January 14, 2004.
In 2004, President George W. Bush outlined NASA's new goals of returning humankind to the moon by 2020, setting up outposts and eventually landing humans on Mars. The space shuttle will be retired in 2010 and a new vehicle will replace it by 2014, capable of both docking with the ISS and leaving the Earth's orbit. The future of the ISS is somewhat uncertain – construction will be completed, but beyond that is less clear.
Florida, USA, taken from NASA Shuttle Mission STS-95 on 31st October 1998.
Larger version.
NASA space missions
- Crewed space missions
- Crewless space missions
- Mercury Mission
- Venus Missions
- Magellan probe
- Pioneer 11 - Jupiter & Saturn
Field installations
There are 12 NASA field installations:
- John F. Kennedy Space Center, Florida
- Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California
- Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, California
- Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory, near Pasadena, California
- Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas
- Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia
- Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio
- George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama
- Michoud Assembly Facility, New Orleans, Louisiana
- John C. Stennis Space Center, Bay St. Louis, Mississippi
- Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Virginia
Related legislation
- 1958 - National Aeronautics and Space Administration PL 85-568 (passed on July 29)
- 1961 - Apollo mission funding PL 87-98 A
- 1970 - National Aeronautics and Space Administration Research and Development Act PL 91-119
- 1984 - National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act PL 98-361
- 1988 - National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act PL 100-685
See also
- Astronaut
- Space exploration
- Space Shuttle
- European Space Agency
- Canadian Space Agency
- Russian Aviation and Space Agency
- NASDA
- Earth
- Space Race
External links
- NASA Home Page
- The Failure of NASA: And A Way Out by Philip K. Chapman, Space Daily, May 30, 2003. An opinion piece which claims that NASA's problems are not in lack of funding but in mismanagement and a false belief in unsuccessful "giant leap" projects like the space shuttle and the International Space Station. Contains a graphic of NASA's funding up to 2005.
