Sixty years ago, spurred by competition with the Soviet Union, the United States created NASA, launching a journey that would take Americans to the moon within a decade. Since then, the US space agency has seen glorious achievements and crushing failures in its drive to push the frontiers of space exploration, including a fatal launch pad fire in 1967 that killed three and two deadly shuttle explosions in 1986 and 2003 that took 14 lives. Now, NASA is struggling to redefine itself in an increasingly crowded field of international space agencies and commercial interests, with its sights set on returning to deep space. These bold goals make for soaring rhetoric, but experts worry the cash just isn’t there to meet the timelines of reaching the moon in the next decade and Mars by the 2030s. And NASA’s inability to send astronauts to space — a capacity lost in 2011 when the space shuttle program ended, as planned, after 30 years — is a lasting blemish on the agency’s stellar image. While US private industries toil on new crew spaceships, NASA still must pay Russia $80 million per seat for US astronauts to ride to space on a Soyuz capsule. How it started In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into space with Sputnik 1, while US attempts were failing miserably. The US government was already working on reaching space, but mainly under the guise of the military. President Dwight D. Eisenhower appealed to Congress to create a separate, civilian space agency to better focus on space exploration. He signed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act into law on July 29, 1958. NASA opened its doors in October 1958, with about 8,000 employees and a budget of $100 million. Space race The Soviets won another key part of the space race in April 1961 when Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit the Earth. A month later, John F. Kennedy unveiled plans to land a man on the moon by decade’s end. “No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish,” the US president said. The Apollo program was born. In 1962, astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. In 1969, NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. American astronauts of the era were national heroes — military pilots with the combination of brains, guts and grit that became known famously as “The Right Stuff,” the title of the classic Tom Wolfe book. Armstrong’s words as he set foot on the lunar surface — “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” — were heard by millions around the world. “Apollo was a unilateral demonstration of national power,” recalled John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “It was Kennedy deciding to use the space program as an instrument of overt geopolitical competition that turned NASA into an instrument of national policy, with a very significant budget share,” he told AFP. A total of five percent of the national budget went to NASA in the Apollo era. Now, NASA gets about $18 billion a year, less than a half percent of the federal budget, “and it is no longer the same instrument of national policy,” Logsdon said. New era More glory days followed in the 1980s with the birth of NASA’s shuttle program, a bus-sized re-usable spacecraft that ferried astronauts into space, and eventually to the International Space Station, which began operation in 1998. But what is NASA today? President Donald Trump has championed a return to the moon, calling for a lunar gateway that would allow a continuous stream of spacecraft and people to visit the moon, and serve as a leaping off point for Mars. Trump has also called for the creation of a “Space Force,” a sixth branch of the military that would be focused on defending US interests. NASA has long been viewed as a global leader in space innovation, but today the international field is vastly more populated than 60 years ago. “Now you have something like 70 countries that are one way or another involved in space activity,” said Logsdon. Rather than competing against international space agencies, “the emphasis has shifted to cooperation” to cut costs and speed innovation, said Teasel Muir-Harmony, curator at the National Air and Space Museum. Published in Daily Times, July 28th 2018.