There are some key facts about NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration):
1. NASA was created on July 29, 1958, from the National Aeronautics and Space Act.
2. The 2009 funding for NASA is $17.6 billion bucks.
3. Together with its motto as”For the Benefit of All”, NASA was affected by the distance race, with the initiation of the Soviet space program’s earliest human-made satellite, Sputnik 1, on October 4, 1957.
4. The Apollo program, which was a spaceflight application from 1961-1975, was designed to land humans on the Moon and bring them back to Earth. Apollo 1 tragically stopped when all of the astronauts on board were killed on account of this fire at the control module through an experimental simulation. Apollo 11, on July 20, 1969, landed the first men on the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
5. The six assignments of the Apollo program returned nearly 400 kilograms of lunar samples with experiments such as meteoroids, heat flow, seismic, lunar ranging, soil mechanics, magnetic fields, and solar wind experiments.
6. The Skylab was the first space station that the United States had begun to orbit. From 1973 to 1979, this 75-tonne channel was in the planet’s orbit. It intended to research gravitational anomalies in other solar systems but has been curtailed because of a lack of interest and funding. The channel was seen by the team three times in 1973 and 1974.
7. The Apollo-Soyuz has been the first joint flight of the U.S. and Soviet space programs. This occurred in July 1975.
8. The significant focus of NASA in the late 1970s and 1980s was that the Space Shuttle.
9. America and Russia are the two biggest partners in the largest space station ever built, the International Space Station. It had been difficult for NASA to justify the ISS since it prices over $100 billion bucks.
10. The 1990s has been a challenging time for NASA, confronting shrinking annual budgets due to Congressional belt-tightening from Washington D.C. NASA’s ninth administrator, Daniel Goldin, in reaction, pioneered the”faster, better, cheaper” approach that enabled NASA to cut costs while still providing several aerospace applications.
11. As of December 2006, NASA has made 116 powerful launches.
12. The present space coverage of the USA is”implement a sustained and affordable human and robotic program of space exploration and create, develop, and utilize civil space methods to advance basic scientific understanding of the Earth system, solar system, and world.”
13. Ongoing investigations of NASA include detailed polls of Mars and Saturn and research from the Earth and the Sun.
14. One NASA spacecraft is currently en route to Mercury and Pluto.
15. NASA’s itinerary covers more than half of the solar system, together with assignments to Jupiter from the preparation phases.
16. In 2011, an enhanced and larger planetary rover, Mars Science Laboratory, is supposed to start.
17. The New Horizons mission to Pluto was launched in 2006 and will soar into Pluto in 2015. The research obtained a gravity assist from Jupiter in February 2007, which analyzed Jupiter’s inner moons.
18. The MAVEN spacecraft is about the horizon of NASA’s programs and is a part of the Mars Scout Program to examine the atmosphere of Mars.
19. The Vision for Space Exploration is the United States space policy which was declared on January 14, 2004, by United States President George W. Bush that in 2018, humanity will come back to the moon and set up outposts as a testbed and a possible source for future assignments.
20. In 2010, the Space Shuttle will retire and be replaced by Orion by 2015, which will be capable of both dockings with the International Space Station and depart the planet’s orbit.
21. NASA announced on December 4, 2006, it had been planning on constructing a permanent moon base.
22. NASA’s headquarters is located in Washington, D.C.
23. The Administrator of NASA is the highest-ranking official and functions as the senior area science advisor to the President of the USA.
24. NASA remains the only area agency to have established space missions to the outer solar system beyond the asteroid belt.