NASA Turns Fifty

NASA began operations on October 1, 1958, with a staff of 80 spread among four laboratories. The agency now consists of 15 facilities that employed more than 17,000 people in 2006, according to Best Places to Work.

The agency's mission statement since 2006 has been "to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."

After the early tragedy of Apollo 1, in which three astronauts died in a fire on the launch pad when the hatch door wouldn't open, the Apollo program made six successful moon landings in 1969 and the 1970s.

NASA's recent history has been marred, however, by the losses of two Shuttles—Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003—and their 14 astronauts.

Faced with shrinking budgets during the 1990s, the agency under administrator Dan Golden adopted the mantra of "faster, better, cheaper," focusing on smaller robotic missions to Mars.
Coincidentally or not, NASA lost two craft in 1999: Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander. It followed up in 2003, however, with the Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which are still active, their missions having been extended multiple times.

Riding on the Spirit rover's successful landing, President Bush announced in January 2004 that NASA's new goal would be returning astronauts to the moon by 2020 to establish a waystation for a manned mission to Mars.

To meet that goal, the agency plans to retire the aging space shuttle fleet in 2010 and replace it with the more Apollo-like Orion craft, part of the Constellation Program, by 2015.

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