The birth of NASA, 60 years ago today, was spurred on by the Soviets and would see the U.S. space effort soar in the '60s to the dizzying heights of the greatest ever moment in human exploration, shift to traversing the solar system in the seventies and, after an embarrassing hiatus in its ability to launch humans, now once again try to rekindle the pride and awe that can only come when a human being plants a flag on a distant space rock.
Since Russia launched the Space Age with the "beep beep beep" of Sputnik’s telemetry, its missions, hardware and cosmonauts have been an insistent presence that can’t be ignored if you are to make sense of NASA’s journey from Earth to the stars.
Soon after the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite by the Soviets, the Defense Department responded by approving funding for Wernher von Braun and his Army Redstone Arsenal team to work on the first U.S. satellite Explorer 1, which was launched on Jan. 31, 1958. It had a scientific payload that discovered the magnetic radiation belts around the Earth (unknowingly, they had also been spotted by an instrument on Sputnik 2, the first satellite to carry a live animal, Laika the dog).
Sputnik also prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to sign NASA’s founding legislation, the 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act, on July 29, 1958. "This led to the fractured U.S. space effort being combined and coordinated," Millard said. Civilian space efforts were rolled into NASA when it opened for business on Oct. 1 of that year, notably the long-running National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, with its $300 million in facilities along with around 7,500 employees, including many people who would star in the future moon landings, such as Gene Kranz and Neil Armstrong.
Most people trace the origin of Armstrong’s trajectory that led him to plant the first step upon the moon to May 25, 1961, when, just six weeks after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, President John F. Kennedy announced a bold plan for NASA to put an American on the moon, and to return him safely to Earth, by the end of the decade.
"In fact," Millard said, "the origins of the moon program predate Kennedy’s speech by years." The idea of a lunar mission was first officially aired at a meeting of NASA program planners in November 1959. Early the following year, Abe Silverstein proposed the name after perusing a book of mythology at home. The engineer who had come to NASA from NACA thought that the image of "Apollo riding his chariot across the Sun was appropriate to the grand scale of the proposed program." The following month, NASA received a report from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency titled "A Lunar Exploration Program Based Upon Saturn-Boosted Systems."
NASA’s first Administrator, T. Keith Glennan, who had an unlikely sounding background in Hollywood, had "fought to keep NASA small" and only envisioned a manned trip to the moon sometime after 1970.