Happy Birthday! NASA celebrates 50 years

NASA’s first space program was Project Mercury, a $2.7 billion (adjusted for inflation) attempt to put man in orbit that stemmed from the Man in Space Soonest (MISS) program. The 3.51-metre Mercury rockets could only fit a single crew member, who, according to NASA, did not so much ride the craft as wear it. On May 5, 1961, the first Mercury vessel successfully carried an American pilot.

On May 25, less than three weeks after a single American astronaut had spent just 15 minutes in sub-orbital flight, President Kennedy proclaimed to Congress that the US should commit to landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade. The first phases of the space race had ended with Russian superiority – now it was up to NASA to turn the tide.

Putting Man on the Moon

While the USSR maintained a technological edge over the US for much of the space race, they lacked a very important factor – a cohesive, organizational entity, like NASA, to co ordinate their efforts. In 1964, 30 distinct launcher and spacecraft designs were being simultaneously developed and pushed by various scientific, military and political advocates within the Soviet Union. The space efforts of the USSR were also hampered by the bureaucracy of communism – programs had to be scheduled in harmony with the grand five-year plans, severely reducing Russia’s ability to adapt their strategies to the accelerating American program.

Sergey Korolyov, the secretive Soviet engineer known only to the outside world as the “Chief Designer”, was eventually given complete authority over the manned space program in 1964, but his death two years later put the Soviet space program in further disarray. Infighting and divisiveness within the Russian space program allowed a more unified NASA to snatch the lead, during the most pivotal stretch of the space race – the quest to put man on the moon. While the space race would continue past the moon landing in projects like Skylab, Apollo 11 represented its apex.

The Apollo program cost $135 billion (adjusted for inflation) – the largest commitment of resources ever made by a nation in peacetime. At its peak, NASA employed 400,000 people, and solicited the support of 20,000 firms and universities. When Apollo 11 landed on July 20, 1969, one fifth of the world’s population watched the moonwalk on television.

Beyond the moon

In Moondust, Andrew Smith comments that of all the milestones that cause people to remember where they were, the moon landing is the only one that does not involve death or conflict. The language of NASA is unusually spiritual for a government agency – a recent space exploration proposal claims that what they are engaged in is “more than just science.” The intangible aspects of NASA’s research, the amazing photographs, the sense of exploration and discovery, are examples of the rare resource which NASA is uniquely able to provide from outer space: perspective.

...continued