The United States first developed its space program during the cold war with the goal of promoting military technology, while also reinforcing public confidence in the superiority of American science and technology. After the United States won the space race, however, the program gradually evolved from a military application into a more civilian-oriented, commercial enterprise.
The American space program started after President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Space Act on July 29, 1958, creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Throughout the decade of the 1960s, NASA received almost $35 billion in funding for the purpose of safely transporting a manned vehicle to the Moon and back. By the 1970s, the influx of resources created five program offices within NASA, including: Aeronautics and Space Technology, which develops necessary equipment; Space and Science Applications, which researches the origin, structure, and evolution of the universe; Space Flight, which includes direction of all manned and unmanned space transportation; Space Tracking and Data, which gathers information on existing space objects; and Space Station, which facilitates NASA’s long-term goal of a manned space station. With its headquarters in Washington, D. C., NASA has affiliated programs at the Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, Maryland), Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, California), Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (Houston, Texas), Kennedy Space Center (Cape Canaveral, Florida), and Langley Research Center (Hampton, Virginia).
The Apollo space program began in 1966 as the final phase of NASA’s race to the Moon. Though the first Apollo mission resulted in three fatalities after a malfunction on the launch pad, the 11th mission succeeded in sending Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin to the Moon’s surface in July 1969. Over the six years of the Apollo program, NASA sent 17 missions into space, six of which successfully landed on the Moon, during which 12 men actually touched the surface. After its goals had been achieved, and American superiority demonstrated in that field, the increasingly large collection of moon rocks no longer seemed to justify the massive expense of each launch, and the Apollo program ended after its final mission in December 1972. Federal funding for NASA dropped as a percentage of the federal budget every year until 1987; the largest cuts came immediately following Armstrong’s successful leap for mankind.
Critics charged the space program with being an expensive symbol of cold war braggadocio, which diverted federal funds from necessary social programs. Supporters replied that NASA and the space program represented America’s commitment to scientific discovery, which influenced the values of modern society. By the mid-1960s, 80 percent of all funding came from government research and development sources, 90 percent of which are devoted to the Department of Defense, NASA, and the Atomic Energy Commission. The operations budget of NASA doubled every year between 1959 and 1964, reaching a peak in 1966 with a budget of $5.93 billion, which was almost 6 percent of the federal budget. Other major powers like China, Japan, France, and especially the Soviet Union tried to approximate American spending levels even though their gross national products (GNP) were significantly less. The result was a major leap forward in science and technology not only in the United States but also for the world in general.
Society has benefited from the direct products of space technology, such as telecommunication satellites, advanced Doppler radar for meteorological forecasting, global positioning systems, and the vastly improved accuracy of digital mapping. Society also benefits from the spillover technologies that arise when private corporations use the technical discoveries they learned from fulfilling government contracts and apply them to other, related innovations with strictly commercial applications; for example, medical researchers now use the techniques NASA developed to extract data from satellite images. In addition, private corporations routinely sell and rely on freeze-dried foods, which were originally developed for the Apollo program, while the protective insulation used by super tankers carrying liquefied natural gas came from technology used in the Saturn V launch vehicle.
NASA responded to budget cuts of the 1970s by focusing on other areas of exploration that were not so closely tied to cold war competition, including developing unmanned space probes, a space station, and a reusable space shuttle. NASA’s probes stimulated public interest by investigating science fiction’s most popular planet; starting in 1972, the Mariner program sent numerous probes past Mars to map out and investigate the planet’s surface, resulting in the transmission of more than 7,000 surprisingly clear pictures. By 1975, the Viking program sent two satellites accompanied by remote landers, which descended to the surface to take soil samples and panoramic photographs that were relayed back to Earth from the orbiting satellites. At the same time, the Pioneer and Voyager programs’ probes went beyond the red planet to study Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus. Pioneer X became the first spacecraft to travel beyond the asteroid belt, and after 12 years in space, Voyager II became the first man-made object to leave the solar system in 1989. Pioneer X’s weak signal continues to be tracked, and Voyager II is expected to continue transmitting data until 2025.
Not all NASA projects, however, were as successful as these programs. Skylab, the first American space station, was launched in 1973 and eventually housed nine astronauts over three missions during a 10-month period. After February 1974, the $2.9 billion Skylab remained vacant for five years until it prematurely fell into a decaying orbit, which the onboard boosters failed to correct. To NASA’s great embarrassment, the station fell into a sparsely populated region of western Australia after only six years in orbit.
NASA’s most successful program, the space shuttle, received its first funding in 1972 when President Richard M. Nixon signed a bill providing a $5.5 billion six-year commitment. Originally, the shuttle was intended to serve as an auxiliary to the space station by providing a relatively inexpensive form of transportation to the Earth’s high atmosphere, but Skylab had already crashed two years before the shuttle’s first launch in 1981. The space shuttle program eventually outgrew Skylab to become the pride of NASA; the agency built six shuttles over a 10-year period, including Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Endeavor, Atlantis, and Discovery. In 1986, after 24 successful missions, however, the space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing all seven passengers on board, including Sharon Christa McAuliffe, who was the first civilian passenger to ride into space. The explosion stunned the public; NASA had not suffered any casualties since the Apollo 1 mission in 1966, and the public had largely taken the risks of space travel for granted. The immediate effect was a general halt to all future shuttle missions until NASA determined the causes for the explosion and implemented necessary safeguards to prevent it from occurring again. As a result, the space program remained in relative stasis for two years while it reassessed its position.
At the same time, however, the possibility that budget cuts may have led to the tragedy forced Congress to reconsider its funding allocation; though NASA has yet to even come close to the budgets it enjoyed during the 1960s, the agency received significant increases relative to the total budget for every year between 1987 and 1993, bringing funding back to the same relative position it had in 1975.
During the 1990s, NASA refocused its energies toward a more cost-effective exploration of the solar system, in cooperation with nations around the world, including its former competitor, Russia. On one of the first missions after the explosion, the Galileo craft hitched a ride on the space shuttle Atlantis before beginning its trip to Jupiter, where it arrived in 1995 and transmitted hundreds of thousands of pictures before being deliberately plunged into the Jovian atmosphere in 1999. In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was set in orbit 370 miles above Earth,
Billows of steam and smoke rise as space shuttle Endeavor lifts off at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. (NASA/Newsmakers)
Where it takes pictures of the universe without the distorting effects of the Earth’s atmosphere. After an initial flaw in the optics was repaired in 1993, Hubble amazed the scientific community and the public alike with its clear images. The Hubble Deep Field images have given mankind its deepest, most visible view of the universe. The success of Hubble paved the way for even greater cooperation between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA. NASA upgraded the telescope in 2000, and plans to launch the “Next Generation space telescope” in 2008. In 1997 NASA deployed the Mars Pathfinder mission as part of its Discovery program aimed at providing faster and less expensive exploration missions. The lander, which was named Sojourner, was developed and produced for a 10th of the cost of its predecessors from the Mariner and Viking programs; the lander sent back 16,000 images over a three-month period, which helped reinvigorate public support for NASA. Unfortunately, in 1999 both vehicles in the Mars Surveyor were lost in space; including the Deep Space 2 probes and the Mars Polar Lander (December); the Mars Climate Orbiter (September) failed when engineers failed to properly convert specifications from English to metric units.
Other programs, that included the Deep Space I, Lunar Prospector, and the Mars Global Surveyor were successful, and NASA still has plans for several manned missions to Mars during the first decade of the 21st century. Deep Space I, launched on October 24, 1998, tested 12 advanced, high-risk technologies in space and returned the best images and other scientific data ever from a comet. NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, launched in 1997, proved a resounding success. The Surveyor served the longest and produced the most information of any mission ever sent to Mars, sending its final transmission on November 2, 2006.
NASA’s most controversial effort, however, has been the International Space Station (ISS). Conceived in 1983, NASA developed the station in cooperation with Russia, Canada, Japan, and 11 members of the European Space Agency. The United States and Russia launched the first modules in 1998. The first resident crew of three entered the station on November 2, 2000, establishing a permanent human presence in space. The U. S. and Russian space programs provided all the early crew members. German ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter joined the Expedition 13 crew in July 2006, becoming the first crew member from another space agency. The station has been visited by astronauts from an additional 14 countries and by the first five space tourists. to the results of experiments performed on the ISS, researchers have learned a great deal about growing plants in space, the health hazards posed by space radiation, and answers to other critical questions, which someday may make it possible for humans to live on Mars and other planets.
It has been difficult for NASA to justify the cost of the ISS. Historically, the public has been harder to impress with the details of scientific experiments in space than with news of grand missions such as the first lunar landing. The ISS has turned out to be far more expensive than the $98 billion originally budgeted for the project. Construction delays and frequent modifications in design resulted in added costs. Then the breakup of the Columbia on February 1, 2003, led to a two-and-a-half-year suspension of the U. S. space shuttle program. The disaster created uncertainty over whether the ISS would ever be finished. Russia kept the ISS functioning, carrying out crew exchanges with the ISS using its Soyuz spacecraft until the space shuttle program resumed with the launch of Discovery on July 26, 2005. ISS assembly resumed with the next Discovery launch on September 9, 2006. Originally planned for completion in 2005, the ISS is now expected to be finished in 2010, with a total cost expected to reach approximately $130 billion.
See also ARMS RACE; COLD WAR; COMPUTERS; SCI
ENCE AND TECHNOLOGY.
Further reading: Walter McDougall, The Heavens and Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
—Aharon W. Zorea and Stephen E. Randoll
World History
