NASA turns 55: An Ars Technica tribute to space flight

This week, NASA celebrated its 55th anniversary. On July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower signed into law the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which authorized the creation of a new civilian agency named the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The act formalized the United States' predominantly military space operations and also marked the end of the 42-year-old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which previously provided oversight on the existing disparate pre-spaceflight activities underway across the country.

NASA's foundation came at a time when tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were significantly ramping up. The launch of Sputnik by the Soviets in October 1957 has a clear subtext beneath the scientific overtones—the Soviets controlled the high ground and could overfly the United States from orbit with total impunity. Nuclear war was considered a real possibility, and its likelihood would only increase over the next five years.

Although it was a civilian agency, NASA's formation was a highly political action—as was its goal. Thanks to conversations between President Kennedy and Deputy Director Hugh Dryden, the agency was targeted almost from its inception at landing Americans on the moon. The accomplishment would be mostly symbolic—at least at first—but it had two hidden bonuses. First, the estimated cost of tens of billions of tax dollars pumped into private industry across the country would ensure its popularity with the US people. More importantly, it was also designed to force the Soviets to spend their own money on a matching effort, the existence of which the Soviets denied until just before the USSR's dissolution.

Running out of the gate: Mercury and Gemini

In the early years, all roads led to Apollo... but those roads were utterly unmapped. In order to land on the moon, NASA engineers and managers designed a decade-long set of tests to figure out how to create the materials, procedures, and technology necessary to land on the moon. The first step was proving humans could survive and operate in space; to that end, Project Mercury started with seven highly trained pilots and transformed them into the United States' first astronauts. Shepard, Grissom, Cooper, Schirra, Slayton, Glenn, and Carpenter—many of the names, even today, still have a celebrity ring to them. The seven Mercury astronauts were treated as heroes and gods by the media of the day, and even though Project Mercury didn't put a human in space before the Soviets managed it, it blazed its own parallel trail as fast as their rockets could take them.

After Mercury came Project Gemini, with bigger spacecraft and more ambitious missions. Gemini's goal was to prove that humans could survive outside of their spacecraft (something which the Soviets again did first), and also to allow NASA to figure out how rendezvous in orbit worked—knowledge absolutely critical to landing on the moon.

Gemini and Mercury were stunning successes. We were on our way.

The giant leap

Project Apollo flew toward its goal with sure feet—until the entire program was halted with the deaths of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee in the Apollo 1 fire. Critically called "a failure of imagination," the fire was technically the result of frayed wiring sparking in an environment of pure, pressurized oxygen—but more correctly, the fire was the result of NASA management and engineers moving too fast to meet what seemed like an impossible end-of-decade deadline.

However, the stumble was short-lived. With new rules in place and an improved spacecraft, NASA gathered itself up and, through the combined efforts of more than 400,000 men and women scattered through all corners of the US, won the race. On July 20, 1969, just shy of eight years after President Kennedy's special address to Congress where the moon landing was officially announced to the public, humans set foot on another world for the first time in the history of our species.

A space pickup truck and a house to live in

Apollo, for all its awesome achievements, was executed with effectively unlimited funds—and because of that, in spite of its success, the program was quickly terminated. It has been famously lamented by more than one astronaut and by several scientists that NASA stopped going to the moon just as they were getting really good at it.

Several programs made use of surplus Apollo hardware—the Skylab program launched a space station made up of a Saturn V's S-IVB upper stage into orbit and used Apollo spacecraft to ferry crew to it; the final Apollo flight was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, where a US and Soviet spacecraft docked in orbit and the crew exchanged symbolic gifts and ate a meal together.

But the future, NASA felt, was in reusable spacecraft. All previous US spacecraft had been single-shot affairs, but in order to make access to space truly affordable, NASA envisioned their next craft as fully reusable end-to-end. It would launch like a rocket, ferry people or cargo to space, land like a plane, be refitted, and launch again days later. NASA initially wanted this Space Transport System, or STS, to fly dozens of times in any given month. Space flight would become safe, cheap, and routine.

Of course, the Space Shuttle never flew dozens of times per month—or even dozens of times per year. The resulting vehicle was designed with input from lots of government agencies, including the NRO and the Air Force, as NASA hoped to drive down its aggregate launch costs by hauling military payloads to orbit along with civilian ones.

In January 1986, the world was reminded that space travel was not routine when the shuttle Challenger was destroyed on launch. As with the Apollo 1 fire, the problem ultimately had its roots in NASA's management and culture more than in the technical. Unusually cold temperatures the morning before Challenger's launch caused rubber gaskets in its solid rocket motors to become brittle. The temperatures were far below those in which the gaskets had been designed to operate, but NASA management approved the launch anyway. Seven men and women, including a teacher, lost their lives in the accident.

The shuttle program continued, and its goals evolved. After struggling through many different design iterations, NASA and several other countries began work on the International Space Station (ISS), which would go on to become one of the most expensive construction projects in the history of the world. The ISS relied on the lifting capacity of the Space Shuttle fleet to move its parts into orbit (though a station of similar mass could have been lofted by just five Saturn V rockets rather than the dozens and dozens of shuttle flights necessary). More than twice as many spacewalks than had previously occurred in the entire history of space flight were required to bolt the ISS's modules together. The station slowly grew from a pair of docked modules to a sprawling complex bigger than an American football field.

The era of the shuttle drew to a close, but not without a final tragedy. Columbia, the oldest of the orbiter fleet (except for poor mothballed Enterprise) was destroyed on February 1, 2003. Columbia was lost due to a design decision made early in the shuttle program: a piece of foam sheared off of its external tank and collided with the fragile panels on the leading edge of its left wing, which in turn allowed superheated plasma to infiltrate its structure during re-entry. The shuttle's position next to its tankage instead of on top of it, as all previous spacecraft were placed, contributed more than anything else to the accident.

Once again, seven men and women died. I remember attending the memorial service at the Johnson Space Center. It was a hard day.

In spite of tragedy, the program marched on. The remaining shuttle fleet completed construction on the International Space Station, which is even now whizzing along above our heads, still alive, doing science.

Ever faithful: Far-flung robotic servants

For all the glamour of astronauts and their flags and footprints, there is another hugely important aspect of NASA: its robotic probes and spacecraft. If manned space flight stirs the soul, robot space flight has expanded the mind. A comprehensive accounting of the probes and robots dispatched by NASA would fill its own huge, long-form article; we can focus on just a few.

The two Voyager spacecraft, best-known of NASA's deep space probes, passed through the outer planets and delivered stunning imagery and data. They will be the first man-made objects to leave the solar system.

Before Voyager, the twin Pioneer probes charted the outer solar system and beamed back their own images and observations; taken together, Pioneer and Voyager are the most distant objects that have been touched by human hands.

And, of course, we must make mention of the wildly successful—and wildly popular—Mars rovers. Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and now Curiosity—no collection of machines have received as much adulation and praise as those little cars on Mars. Even if humans have for now ceased leaving the confines of our world, we still explore through our surrogates.

The next 55 years

The future for NASA is complex. I'm a fan of space—in case you haven't figured that out yet—but NASA is an agency undergoing a crisis of leadership. There is no clear mission for NASA's manned space flight directorate, and that lack of mission can be blamed squarely on Congress and on NASA's administrators. There is no inspiring plan, no consistent messaging, no sensible goal, and, most damning, there is insufficient funding to accomplish any mission of significance (and a manned asteroid landing, the agency's current, vaguely stated goal, is not a mission of significance in my opinion).

If this set of image galleries seems biased toward the glories of the past, there is reason: NASA is not now what it was. Decades of stagnation and bad leadership across multiple levels of management have caused the agency to take on the aspect of a nursing-home-bound pensioner—once lively and spry and able to accomplish literally anything, and now plodding forward while spending an inordinate amount of time recalling past glories. My generation, raised in the 1980s and 90s, has had no moon shot—no triumph of science and imagination. Instead, we've been able to see mankind venture timidly back and forth into low Earth orbit, never even leaving its own front yard. It is more than disappointing—it's dispiriting.

I expect more from an agency whose mission by its very nature is designed to generate awe. NASA is failing, and it deserves to be saved.

Listing image by NASA