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NASA is 50 Today!
July 29 is the 50th Anniversary of the USA’s NASA space agency, established in 1958. Created as a response to the 1957 launch of the Soviet Union’s artificial satellite Sputnik, NASA has engineered the Moon landing programme (the Mercury and Apollo programmes), long-distance research of the solar system and beyond, and more recently (and jointly with the Russians) the orbiting space station. But what’s next? Oddly enough NASA has never been that concerned with artificial orbiting satellites. The US military were working on their own rocket and satellite programmes ahead of NASA, but without NASA’s development cash it would have been difficult to fund the advances in rocketry that have given the world the near-commonplace satellites that are today’s backbone to pay-TV and global television distribution.
Today NASA is concerned with developing lower-cost access vehicles to space, in particular the Ares and Orion programmes, and thus make access to the International Space Station (ISS) independent of Russia. There’s another Moon landing programme, and a Mars scheme. NASA controls a budget of $17bn of which about two-thirds goes to the Space Shuttle and ISS tasks.
