Four astronauts from NASA, are in space as of 2025's second quarter. Three of those are supposed to come back to Earth in July. One is supposed to come back in December.
NASA was preceded by the "National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics" (NACA). NACA was a US federal agency founded on March 3, 1915 to undertake, promote, and institutionalizeaeronautical research. On October 1, 1958 the agency was dissolved, and its assets and personnel transferred to the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).[8] NASA was founded to compete with theSoviet Union in thespace race. In the 1950s and 1960s there was a space race between theUS and theSoviet Union - now calledRussia. The Soviets started first launchingSputnik 1, the first object made by people to go intoorbit, in October 1957. The Americans were worried by this. It caused acrisis known as the Sputnik Crisis as the Americans feared the Russians might start building weapons in space. This all happened at a time called theCold War when the US and the Soviet Union were always very close towar.
Originally NASA was very small with only fourlaboratories and around eighty people working there.Germanengineers and scientists led byWernher von Braun helped them buildrockets. They had helped build theV-2 missile in Germany duringWorld War II[9] and theRedstone missile for theUS Army afterwards. Their Army missile laboratory was transferred to NASA.
In 1960 they set up the Mercury project. The Mercury Projectspace missions were designed by NASA, mostly to test ifhumans could survive inspace. After they proved it was possible for people to live in space they moved on.
On May 15th 1961 astronautAlan Shepard became the first American in space. Less than a year later,John Glenn became the first American toorbit or circle theEarth. He did so in aspacecraft called Friendship 7. Once the Mercury Project proved that humans could live in space, the Gemini Project was started. Less than a year after it began, the Apollo Program also began.
After the success of Mercury, NASA realized it had to start planning for its missions tothe Moon. TheGeminispacecraft was built for two men. It was still small andcramped similar to the Mercury capsule, but allowed for more freedom of movement. Project Gemini proved that two spacecraft could rendezvous (meet and dock) in space.Neil Armstrong, the first man onthe Moon, was also on the first Gemini flight to dock with another spacecraft in outer space. The Gemini spacecraft did not dock with another spacecraft with people in it. Instead, it docked with a modified rocket stage called the "Agena Target Vehicle". The last few Gemini missions were science experiments andspacewalks designed to prepare for theApollo Program, which would land human beings onthe Moon.
The Apollo program was started byPresidentJohn F Kennedy in the 1960s. The program was made of 16 missions designed to send a man tothe Moon and return him safely back toEarth. The first Apollo mission,Apollo 1, ended in disaster when afire in the command module killed all the astronauts on board.[10] TheApollo 8 and10 missions went to the moon. They tested equipment and tookphotos but did not land.
The project's main success came in 1969 whenNeil Armstrong andBuzz Aldrin landed on the Moon as part ofApollo 11. The mission was a big success for NASA and over six million people watched it worldwide.[11] AfterApollo 11, six more Apollo flights went to the moon. Five of them landed. The one that did not land,Apollo 13, had to abort its mission when anoxygen tank exploded in the spaceship.Apollo 17 was the last mission to land onthe Moon.
AfterCongress stopped the Moon landings, NASA needed a new direction. Using a leftoverSaturn V rocket, the giant rocket that sent men tothe Moon, they created a space station that orbited above the Earth. This space station was called Skylab. Skylab was very big on the inside, even bigger than a small house. Skylab was visited by Apollo spacecrafts. There were three missions to Skylab. Each of them carried important experiments. The last crewed mission,Skylab 4, spent 84days, 1hour, 15minutes, 30seconds, longer than any space mission had spent until 1977. Skylab broke up in the atmosphere in 1979.
Soviet and American crews with Apollo–Soyuz model, 1975
During theSpace Race, the Soviets had designed their own spacecraft to fly tothe Moon. Their spacecraft was calledSoyuz. The Soviets never landed on the Moon, they had too many problems.[12] Instead, they started creating small space stations. The Soyuz spacecraft is what they used to go to these space stations. US and Soviet Union were part of theCold War. In order to make peace between Soviet Union and US, they decided they would dock an Apollo spacecraft to a Soyuz spacecraft in space. After docking, the crews performed experiments and learned about each other's cultures. Apollo–Soyuz was the last flight of the Apollo spacecraft. It has never been used since, and as of 2020, there are no plans for it to be used again.
In the1980s and1990s NASA began to concentrate on buildingSpace Shuttles. Four Shuttles were built in 1985. The first to launch was theSpace Shuttle Columbia on April 12, 1981. At this time the public began to lose interest in the space program and NASA facedbudget cuts. They had planned for the Space Shuttles to cost less as they could be used more than once. But eventually it turned out the Space Shuttles were more expensive as building them in the first place cost more money than normal. There were further problems for NASA after theSpace Shuttle Challenger disintegrated in flight in 1986, killing all seven of its astronauts. The incident is known as theChallenger Disaster.
The Challenger Disaster forced NASA to think about the way they worked. The entire Space Shuttle fleet was suspended for a year.[13] After that, NASA launched theHubble Space Telescope into orbit. Its most famous photo was theHubble Deep Field.[14]
In 2011, NASA shut down the Space Shuttle program. They were more expensive to use than other launch vehicles.
In the early 1980s, NASA planned Space Station Freedom as acounterpart to the SovietSalyut andMir space stations. It never left the drawing board and, with the end of theSoviet Union and theCold War, it was cancelled. The end of theSpace Race prompted the U.S. administration officials to start negotiations with international partners Europe, Russia, Japan and Canada in the early 1990s in order to build theInternational Space Station. This project was first announced in 1993 and was called Space Station Alpha.[15] It was planned to combine the proposed space stations of all participating space agencies: NASA's Space Station Freedom, Russia'sMir-2 (the successor to the Mir Space Station, the core of which is now Zvezda) and ESA'sColumbus that was planned to be a stand-alone spacelab.
Curiosity is acar-sizedrover. It was made toexplore thecrater Gale onMars.Curiosity was launched fromCape Canaveral on November 26, 2011, at 15:02UTC and landed onAeolis Palus inside Gale onMars on August 6, 2012, 05:17UTC. TheBradbury Landing site was less than2.4 kilometres (1.5 miles) from where the rover landed after a560million kilometres (350million miles) journey. The goals of the rover include aninvestigation of the Martianclimate andgeology.
TheArtemis 2 mission, isscheduled to launch in 2026. The spaceship is supposed to do aflyby of the Moon. The choice of astronauts (as of 2024's second quarter)
Artemis 4, it is supposed to land a crew on the Moon, no earlier than September 2028.
Artemis 5, it is supposed to land a crew on the Moon, no earlier than March 2030. "Blue Origin [...] was chosen [... in 2023] to develop the landing system for Artemis 5".[17]
In early 2010, PresidentBarack Obama cancelled the Constellation project that was aiming to have humans return to the moon's surface by 2020.[18] He said the project was "behind schedule andlacking ininnovation".[18] At the same time he cut back the amount of money NASA will be getting from the government in 2011.[19]
An artist's picture of a futurespace station on the Moon. NASA called it a "Lunar Gateway"
In 2069, NASA plans to send aspace probe toAlpha Centauri, the closest star system to the Sun. The proposed launch would be on the 100th anniversary of the first Moon landing,Apollo 11.
NASA is continuing operations include missions to theplanetsMars,Saturn andPluto. Missions toJupiter are also planned for the future.[22]
NASA has launched over 500 missions. Over 150 missions hadhumans on board. Suchmanned missions are the most expensive and make the most news but the majority of launches are forspace exploration, science, and other purposes that do not need people. NASAspacecraft such asCassini-Huygens and theVoyager program have visited everyplanet in theSolar System. Four NASA spacecraft have left the Solar System,Voyager 1,Voyager 2,Pioneer 10 andPioneer 11, while the fifth, aNew Horizons spacecraft is estimated to exit the solar system by 2048. As of 2022 Voyager 1 is 23,447,000,000 (23.4 billion)kilometers away fromEarth andVoyager 2 was at a distance 19,474,000,000 (19.4 billion) kilometres away from Earth.[23]
TheNew Horizonsspacecraft flew pastJupiter in February 2007, studying some of the planet'smoons. On July 14, 2015 the craft flew byPluto, took high resolution pictures of the planet's surface and analysed thechemical properties of itsatmosphere.
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