If there’s one thing anyone could gather from the bulk of my space related posts (both the positive ones and the not so positive ones) it’s this: I freaking love NASA.
It’s funny then that it would come as a surprise to me today to see that today, July 29th, marks NASA’s 60th birthday. While operations under NASA started on October 1st, 1958, the actual formation of NASA was a process started following the launch of Sputnik 1 and ending with President Eisenhower signing into law a bill which proposed, in simple form, the conversion of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.
This would normally be the part where I would go into my own telling of how NASA came to be, and all that. That’s not the case here. Oddly, as much as I love NASA, I’ve never looked too deep into the exact details of how it came to be. I know the story, certainly, but not the exact decisions on a day by day basis.
There’s quite a bit to be said about NASA at various times in the past. Not all of it has been good. For as grand an chievement as the Apollo program was, there was the loss of Apollo 1 and, later, the loss of the Space Shuttle Orbiters Challenger and Columbia.
Funding and mismanagement, to me, are the culprits – not the agency in and of itself by the nature of its existence. “Go Fever” combined with cost cutting and a lack of the right people in the right places at the right times always proves to be a fatal combination.
Put the right people in charge, with the right funding, and with that focus placed back on the effort as a nation, with private enterprise working directly with and for NASA we would get results far greater than any other group or working by itself. Such got us to the Moon in just shy of 11 years from the formation of NASA, and such can work for us again if we went back to putting that focus where it should be, getting humans back to the Moon, to Mars, and beyond, as a public effort. A human effort, done by members of a nation, but done for humanity as a whole, and nothing but humanity.
Quite simply, I love the idea of NASA – what it stands for and how it’s done what it has accomplished through the years, even in spite of terrible funding and at times a near complete lack of support.
Here’s to another 60 years and beyond! As for the actual formation of NASA, here’s a few links from the source on the creation of the agency. Enjoy!
https://www.nasa.gov/specials/signing/
https://history.nasa.gov/monograph10/nasabrth.html
Oh, and of course, a wikipedia article on the subject.