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On July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower signed National Air and Space Act, establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as a civilian agency in response to the challenge of the Soviet launch of Sputnik nearly a year before. And NASA is the result of the Space race.

Before the establishment of NASA, American space efforts, such as they were, were divided among the branches of the armed services. The establishment of NASA gathered into one civilian agency, along with the aeronautics research efforts of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) that had been founded in 1915.

Even so, President Eisenhower was somewhat skeptical of funding a large space program and barely approved of the first American man in space program, Project Mercury. It would take another Soviet space feat, the successful orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin, and a new President for NASA to really come into its own.

The first space age, for NASA, was the Apollo program to land a man on the Moon. Born of Cold War necessity, Apollo was one of the greatest and, ultimately, most bitter sweet technological feats in human history. Even decades later, people who were alive when man first landed on the Moon remember it with a kind of heady nostalgia.

With success came a perverse and almost inevitable punishment by the political powers that be. For a time it seemed that publically funded space flight might end in the United States in the early 1970s. Fortunately Richard Nixon, who care less about space exploration than he did about votes and campaign contributions, tasked NASA to a more practical job than lunar voyages of exploration.

NASA was ordered to build a reusable space shuttle that handle all of the nation’s space flight needs, commercial, military, and NASA. The idea was that a reusable space vehicle would decrease the cost of space travel, making possible space stations, a return to the Moon, and maybe voyages beyond. NASA would also have roughly half the budget it thought it needed to do it. Thus the second space age was born.

Not even the space agency that put a man on the Moon could make the space shuttle do all that it was promised. NASA did not make space flight cheaper with the shuttle. Even so the space shuttle has flown close to a hundred and fifty missions, suffered two fatal accidents, and has all but completed the International Space Station, another project mired by technical problems, management snafus, and political interference.

NASA seems to be on the cusp of a third space age in which it has been ordered to return to its space exploration roots by sending human explorers back to the Moon, then on to Mars, and beyond. At the same time NASA has to deal with a nascent commercial space flight industry that proposes to do what NASA failed to do with the space shuttle; make space flight affordable and reliable. Currently NASA seems to have made peace with the idea that it will no longer be alone on the High Frontier. NASA has even instituted programs such as the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services project and the Centennial Challenges to encourage private commercial space development.

But the question arises, is there a place for a government run space agency like NASA in the 21st Century? Some suggest not. Let the private sector take over all space activities, some propose. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich even once opined that it would have been better if NASA had been abolished after Apollo. More recently Gingrich had suggested that much of NASA’s budget be diverted to a set of prizes, tax incentives, and other programs to encourage private space travel and exploration, leaving what is left for technology and science research.

For political reasons, if for no other reason, NASA is likely to endure well into the 21st Century in one form or another. But what form may well depend on the results of this year’s election. John McCain is generally supportive of NASA and the current space exploration initiative, though he is also pledged to bring the federal budget under some kind of control. Barack Obama has proposed to gut NASA funding to pay for an education program. The attitude of either candidate toward commercial space is, at best, uncertain.

Whatever the results of the November election, the world is in for interesting times in space. There will be new players, commercial as well as international. China has become the third space faring power and India and Europe seem ready to follow suit. What role NASA will play in this unfolding adventure remains to be seen.

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