NASA grew out of a 1915 committee worried America had fallen behind in flying
Although the Wright brothers' Dayton is hailed as aviation's birthplace, by 1914 the United States knew Europe had overtaken it in the air. Congress responded in 1915 with a research committee called NACA. Forty-three years later, jolted by Sputnik, the government rebuilt that committee into a civilian space agency: NASA.
For four decades the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics served the armed forces and civil aviation, and after the Second World War it teamed with the Air Force on the Bell X-1 supersonic plane. Its interest in rockets grew from a pilotless aircraft division. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, America's first satellite effort fell not to NACA but to the Navy's troubled Project Vanguard; the Army ultimately put Explorer 1 into orbit on February 1, 1958. The Eisenhower administration then chose to separate civilian and military space work. NASA was created by law on July 29, 1958 and opened for business that October, absorbing NACA's 8,000 staff and three laboratories, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Wernher von Braun's Army rocket team.
Human spaceflight followed quickly. NASA had hoped its first astronauts would be civilians, but Eisenhower insisted on military pilots, and the Mercury Seven came from the Air Force, Navy and Marines. Alan Shepard flew a suborbital hop on May 5, 1961, 23 days after Yuri Gagarin orbited. John Glenn made the first American orbital flight in February 1962, steering parts of it by hand when the autopilot failed. Aeronautics carried on too: the X-15 rocket plane, run jointly with the Air Force, crossed into space and tested technologies later used on Apollo.
The Moon programme dominated the 1960s. At its peak an estimated 5 percent of the American workforce contributed to Apollo, and about half of NASA's budget went to human spaceflight. Gemini, flying two astronauts on modified Titan II rockets, pioneered fuel cells, spacewalks and orbital rendezvous. Apollo 8's crew became the first people to see Earth whole and to watch an Earthrise, over Christmas 1968, and six landings followed from Apollo 11 through Apollo 17 in 1972.
Afterwards the agency pivoted. Skylab, NASA's first station, went up in 1973 on the last Saturn V, needed emergency spacewalks to repair launch damage, and fell back to Earth in 1979. In 1975 an Apollo capsule docked with a Soviet Soyuz. Today NASA runs ten field centres and, for fiscal 2026, was authorised $24.4 billion.
Source: NASA
