NASA

NASA is the space agency of the United States government. The name stands for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA builds spacecraft, studies Earth and the universe, and sends people and robots into space. It was created in 1958 and has its main headquarters in Washington, D.C.

NASA was born out of a race. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit Earth. Americans were shocked. The United States wanted its own space program, so President Eisenhower signed a law creating NASA the next year. The agency's job was to catch up and then lead.

It did both. In 1961, President Kennedy told Americans that the country would land a person on the Moon before the decade ended. NASA pulled it off. On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission. About 650 million people watched on television, which was around one in every five people alive at the time.

Since then, NASA has done much more than send people to space. Its robot rovers, such as Curiosity and Perseverance, drive across Mars and search for signs that life may have once lived there. Its Voyager probes have flown past all four giant planets and now travel through interstellar space, the region between stars. Its space telescopes, like Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, take pictures of galaxies billions of light years away.

NASA also studies Earth itself. Its satellites track hurricanes, measure melting ice, and watch forests grow and shrink. Much of what scientists know about climate change comes from NASA data. The agency runs the International Space Station with partners from Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. Astronauts have lived on the station without a break since the year 2000.

Around 18,000 people work for NASA. They include scientists, engineers, pilots, mathematicians, and mechanics. Katherine Johnson was a NASA mathematician whose calculations helped send the first Americans safely into orbit. Today NASA trains new astronauts for the Artemis program, which plans to return people to the Moon and eventually send them to Mars.

NASA does not build every rocket itself. It often hires private companies, like SpaceX, to carry cargo and astronauts. Many smaller inventions came out of NASA research along the way, including better weather forecasts, scratch-resistant lenses, memory foam, and cordless tools. NASA's budget is less than half of one percent of all U.S. government spending, but its discoveries reach into daily life on Earth and out to the edges of the known universe.