NASA

US government agency for space flight and aeronautical research, founded in 1958 by the National Aeronautics and Space Act. Its headquarters are in Washington, DC, and its main installations include the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island in Florida, the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the Goddard Space Flight Center in Beltsville, Maryland, and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. NASA's early planetary and lunar programmes included the Pioneer probes, from 1958, which gathered data for the later crewed missions, and the Apollo project, which took the first astronauts to the Moon in Apollo 11 on 16–24 July 1969.

NASA launched the first space shuttle in 1981. In the early 1990s, the agency moved towards lower-budget missions, such as the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous craft and the Lunar Prospector. It also established a New Millennium Program to identify, develop, and fly advanced technologies at lower costs. The programme's first launch was Deep Space 1 in 1998, and its Space Technology 6 (ST6) series has been developing new technologies for future flights. A notable success was the Mars Exploration Rover mission which in January 2004 landed two rovers on that planet. However, the break-up of the Columbia shuttle on 1 February 2003, killing all seven astronauts, led to all shuttles being grounded until 2005, as well as an extensive investigation and upgrade of safety. In January 2004, US president George W Bush announced plans to send astronauts back to the Moon in 2020 and later to Mars.

Its other recent major project, in partnership with 15 other nations, is the US$60 billion International Space Station, scheduled for completion in 2006. The first crew arrived at ISS in November 2000 under the command of NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd; by September 2001, six habitable modules had been added to the ISS.