Information on NASA Explorations

NASA or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an American agency managed by the United States government. Its prime responsibility is the organization of the nation's public space programs. NASA was born in 1958, out of the US concern over the Sputnik crisis. The Soviet space program Sputnik 1, launched on October 4, 1957, caused panic within the U.S. Congress at the perceived threat to the nation's security and technological advancement. President Eisenhower and his advisers came up with the idea to develop a new federal agency dedicated to non-military space activity. This era also witnessed the development of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, which in time was merged with NASA. NASA continues to lay the groundwork for sending humans into space and develop robotic missions to further the exploration of the solar system and stimulate public interest in space science and technology.

NASA Explorations

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration program was established in 1958, on July 29. The establishment was the result of the National Aeronautics and Space Act. The agency is responsible for conducting long-term research on available civilian and military aerospace. It adopted the mission statement: 'To pioneer the future in aeronautics research, space exploration and scientific discovery', in February 2006. NASA's motto highlights: 'Benefit of all'. NASA launched its first artificial satellite Explorer 1 or 1958 Alpha on January 31, 1958, at 10:48 pm EST.

President Eisenhower officiated the National Aeronautics and Space Act on July 29, 1958, and kick started the operations of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Initially NASA had four laboratories. All of its 80 employees were part of the 46-year-old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics or NACA, a research agency. The team members and the research program designed were both influenced by the German rocket program that was led by Wernher von Braun. Braun is recognized as the 'Father of the United States space program'.

The initial space programs were designed around human spaceflight research. The competition between the U.S. and the USSR in the rather infamous 'Space Race', an integral part of the Cold War, resulted in Project Mercury. This 1958 experiment was concentrated around whether or not human space exploration was possible. The possibility of man's survival in space was questioned and researched. The team then comprised a specially put together NASA Space Task Group. The group was pledged to probing the possible coordination of existing defense research, infrastructure and technical assistance.

In May, 1961, Alan Shepard, one of the seven astronauts aboard Project Mercury, became the first American in space. He piloted a suborbital flight that lasted 15 minutes. Later, on February 20, 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, aboard Friendship 7. Alongside Project Mercury, a number of other experiments were conducted by NASA to experiment with the possibility of long-duration human spaceflight, docking of two or more vehicles in space and the assimilation of data with regards to the effects of weightlessness. NASA also began to use unmanned probes to explore the solar system during this time. In 1962, Mariner 2 became the first space probe to visit Venus.

NASA's Apollo program was designed for lunar probe. After the failure of Apollo 1 and experiments with Apollo 8 and Apollo 10, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men on the moon, with the Apollo 11 mission. The lunar samples offered NASA ample material and opportunity to experiment with lunar soil mechanics and meteoroids and understand heat flow, magnetic field and solar wind phenomena even better. Skylab was NASA's first space station in orbit, between 1973 and 1979. The station was designed to accommodate a laboratory to study the effects of microgravity. It also had a solar observatory. However, Skylab re-entered the planet's atmosphere in 1979 and was destroyed. Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, in 1975, became the first US - Soviet joint space program. Projects like the Hubble Space Telescope, planetary rover, Mars Science Laboratory, Shuttle-Mir missions and Ares V launch vehicles program NASA's itinerary to cover the entire solar system.