Interesting Facts About NASA

The NASA headquarters are located on 300 E Street SW, Washington DC, in the United States. NASA is an acronym which stands for National Aeronautics andSpace Administration and it became operational on 1 October, 1958. It replaced National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). NACA was dissolved on the day NASA came into being.

The NASA is a space exploration agency but it was founded with the aim to save American national pride. After coming out victorious from the Second World War the United States could not see itself at number two position when it came to space exploration and technology. The former Soviet Union was making rapid progress in the field. They had launched the world’s first artificial satellite – the Sputnik 1 . The NASA employed a lot of German scientists, who had been captured by the American troops during the Second World War. Werner von Braun, who had designed V-2 (Vergeltungswaffe 2) rockets for the Nazi Germany during the World War II, was assigned the job of developing new rockets for the United States. After some initial setbacks, the agency launched its first satellite, Explorer 1, on 31 January, 1958. What followed next was a race between the Americans and Soviets to show off their technological capabilities – this competition between the US and the former USSR is widely known as the ‘Space Race.’
Making a successful human landing on the Moon on 16 July, 1969 is a jewel in the crown in NASA’s history. The feat hasn’t yet been repeated by any other space agency yet. The Voyager space crafts sent by the agency are the farthest man-made objects from the planet.

The NASA employs over 17,000 employees and its budget for the year 2009 was more than $17 billion. The agency had to shelf its plans to develop new rockets to replace the aging fleet of Space Shuttles in 2009-10 because of budget constraints but NASA is still probably the most advanced in certain fields of space exploration.