The National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA

The Soviet launch of Sputnik in October 1957 persuaded Congress that space had become a field of national competition and that it should be led by a civilian agency rather than the military. The National Aeronautics and Space Act, signed by Dwight Eisenhower on July 29, 1958, absorbed the 43-year-old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and its laboratories, and NASA opened on October 1, 1958. Within eleven years it had put astronauts on the Moon, the defining achievement of the American space program and still the only time humans have walked on another world.

NASA organizes its work through mission directorates for exploration, space operations, science, aeronautics, and space technology, carried out at ten field centers, including Johnson in Houston, Kennedy in Florida, Goddard in Maryland, Marshall in Alabama, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which is run by Caltech. Its science missions have produced the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, rovers on Mars, and probes to every planet. It operates the International Space Station with Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada, and its Earth science satellites supply much of the world's climate and weather data.

About 18,000 civil servants and tens of thousands of contractors carry out NASA's programs on a budget near 25 billion dollars, less than half of one percent of federal spending. The agency increasingly buys services rather than building its own vehicles: commercial companies now carry cargo and astronauts to the space station, and SpaceX is building the lander for the Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the Moon. Its Administrator is nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

The agency's direction depends on each administration's priorities and on Congress, which protects the centers and contractors in its members' districts. Artemis has slipped repeatedly and its Space Launch System rocket has drawn criticism for cost. The 2026 budget request proposed cutting NASA by roughly a quarter and its science programs by nearly half, canceling dozens of missions, a plan that scientists opposed and that Congress largely resisted. The agency also lost several thousand employees to buyouts in 2025. Debate continues over whether NASA should lead in exploration or increasingly act as a customer of private space companies.