On this day: NASA is created

Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act on 29 July 1958, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration opened for business on 1 October. The law is short and the decision inside it is simple: American activity in space beyond direct military needs would be run by a civilian agency, publishing its results openly, rather than by the armed forces. Nothing about that was obvious at the time, and a career soldier made the call.

The pressure came from a metal sphere. On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, an aluminium ball 58 centimetres across with four trailing antennas, weighing 84 kilograms. Its only function was to transmit a radio beep that anyone with a shortwave receiver could pick up as it passed overhead. A month later Sputnik 2 carried the dog Laika, which was six times heavier. The alarm in Washington was less about the satellites than about the rocket underneath them. The R-7 that put Sputnik in orbit was designed as an intercontinental ballistic missile, and a booster that can place 84 kilograms in orbit can place a warhead on another continent.

Orbit is worth explaining plainly, because it is the whole trick. A satellite is not held up by rocket thrust, and there is nothing to push against up there. It is falling, continuously, towards the centre of the Earth, and moving sideways fast enough that the ground curves away beneath it at the same rate. Reaching that condition in low orbit requires a sideways speed of roughly 28,000 kilometres per hour, about twenty times the speed of a rifle bullet. That number, rather than altitude, is why orbital launch is difficult and why only a handful of countries could do it in 1957.

The American answer at first was humiliating. The Navy's Vanguard programme had been chosen over an Army proposal partly because it had no visible military lineage. On 6 December 1957 a Vanguard rocket rose about a metre off its pad on live television, settled back and exploded, and the newspapers reached for Flopnik and Kaputnik. The Army was then allowed to try. On 31 January 1958 a Juno I built from a Redstone missile by Wernher von Braun's team, carrying an instrument package from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, put Explorer 1 into orbit. Its Geiger counter behaved oddly at altitude, and James Van Allen worked out that the detector was being saturated by belts of charged particles trapped in Earth's magnetic field. The first American satellite made a real scientific discovery, which the Sputniks had not.

The new agency was built on an existing one that few people outside aviation had heard of. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the NACA, had been set up in 1915 because the United States had fallen behind Europe in aircraft design. It was a research body rather than a builder. Its engineers ran wind tunnels, measured airflow and published the results for any manufacturer to use. NACA work produced the standard families of wing cross-sections still referenced by designers today, the engine cowling that cut drag on radial engines by a large margin and the transonic research that led to the Bell X-1 breaking the sound barrier in 1947. By 1958 it had about 8,000 employees, an annual budget near 100 million dollars, three big laboratories at Langley in Virginia, Ames in California and Lewis in Ohio, plus the flight test station in the California desert that became Dryden and is now Armstrong.

Congress moved quickly by its own standards. Lyndon Johnson, then Senate majority leader, chaired hearings that kept the pressure on through the winter. The serious dispute was over control. The Defence Department argued that space was an extension of the high ground and belonged to the military. Eisenhower disagreed for reasons that were partly budgetary, since he distrusted the growth of what he would later call the military-industrial complex, and partly strategic. He wanted to establish the principle that spacecraft may pass over any country without permission, since American reconnaissance satellites were already in development and that principle would be far easier to defend if the first satellites were transparently scientific. A civilian agency publishing its findings made the argument for him.

The military did not go away. The Advanced Research Projects Agency, now DARPA, had been created in February 1958 to handle defence space work, and the split between the two has held ever since. What the 1958 act settled was that the visible, civil side of American spaceflight would answer to an administrator rather than a general, and would publish what it learned.

T. Keith Glennan, president of the Case Institute of Technology, became the first administrator, with the NACA's director Hugh Dryden as his deputy. The pairing was deliberate: an outsider manager and an insider who knew where every wind tunnel and engineer was. Glennan spent his first months absorbing other people's programmes. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory transferred from the Army in December 1958. Project Mercury, the effort to put a person in orbit, was announced within weeks. In 1960 the Army's rocket team at Huntsville under von Braun came over too and became the Marshall Space Flight Centre, which is how the agency acquired the people who would build the Saturn V.

Eisenhower himself was not a space enthusiast. He approved satellites and scientific missions and balked at the cost of putting people on the Moon, dismissing one study committee's ambitions as beyond any reasonable return. The commitment he declined came in May 1961 from John F. Kennedy, seven weeks after Yuri Gagarin's flight. That is the irony sitting on top of 29 July 1958. Eisenhower created the institution, deliberately built it to be sober, open and civilian, and it was immediately used for the most expensive prestige project in the history of peacetime government.

The structure has outlasted almost everything else from the period. NASA still publishes its data, still runs the aeronautics laboratories it inherited and still operates alongside a separate military space organisation, now the Space Force. The open publication requirement written into the 1958 act is the reason so much American spaceflight data ended up in the public domain, which in turn is why a commercial launch industry had something to build on decades later.

Eagle Frame's takeaway: 29 July 1958 was less about rockets than about who would own them. Eisenhower chose a civilian agency that published its work, and that choice is why the Moon landings were televised, why NASA imagery is free to use and why American space science has been argued over in public for nearly seventy years.