The NACA and NASA

On October 1, 1958, the 170 people who worked at the headquarters of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics gathered in the courtyard of their building in Washington. They heard T. Keith Glennan announce that the 43-year-old committee had ended and a new agency, NASA, had begun.

The committee, known as the NACA, was created on March 3, 1915, during the First World War, through a clause added to a bill for the Navy. It was an unpaid panel of twelve members, with a budget of $5,000 a year. Its task was "to supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight." In 1920 it opened its own laboratory at Langley Field, Virginia, and around 1940 it added two more, at Moffett Field, California, and near Cleveland, Ohio. Over the next decades its wind tunnels and test flights helped shape American aircraft. In the 1950s its engineers studied how to bring objects back safely through the air from high speeds.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. On April 2, 1958, President Eisenhower asked Congress for a civilian space agency built on the NACA. The law that followed gave space science and exploration to that agency and left weapons and defense to the Defense Department. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act on July 29, 1958. His statement on the signing, Signing the National Aeronautics and Space Act in Hearth Library, calls the NACA "the nucleus for the NASA" and praises its record of research.

The NACA's 8,000 people, three laboratories, and two stations passed to NASA whole. Other teams joined from the Navy, the Army, and the Air Force, among them the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and, in 1960, Wernher von Braun's rocket group at Huntsville, Alabama. One week after NASA opened, Glennan approved Project Mercury, the first American program to put people in space.

On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy asked Congress to commit the country to landing a man on the Moon before 1970. In his speech of September 12, 1962, We choose to go to the Moon, he explained that goal to a crowd in Houston. NASA had announced the year before that its Manned Spacecraft Center would be built there, to design the spacecraft for crews and to control their flights.