A New Agency

On October 1, 1958, Congress created a new organization “to provide for research into the problems of flight with­in and outside the Earth’s atmosphere, and for other purposes.” This new organ­ization was the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.

NASA had broad goals linked to the needs of national defense and the advancement of U. S. space science. It was hoped, through the direction of a single agency, that NASA would avoid the duplication of effort that had occurred through separate U. S. Air Force, Army, and Navy rocket programs.

When NASA came into being on October 1, 1958, it absorbed NACA’s employees (there were by then 8,000 of them) and its three major research labo­ratories: Langley, Ames, and Lewis. NASA also acquired the facilities operat­ed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). This lab, run by the California Institute of Technology for the U. S. Army and the U. S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency, was where rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun and other engineers were at work on long-range missiles.