October has come, and with it we celebrate the birth date of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, better known by its acronym NASA.
On July 29, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower passed an act that established NASA with the purpose of encouraging peaceful human space exploration. The operation opened its doors on October 1st of the same year, and this year marks its 55th anniversary.
NASA is perhaps best known for the Apollo moon-landings. On July 20, 1969, only 12 years after NASA launched, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. As he stepped onto lunar surface, Armstrong described the event as "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." You can watch the televised moon-landing here.
Interestingly, Armstrong was not the first man to journey into outer space – Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin completed an orbit around the Earth in 1961. After World War II ended, the United States and Russia started fighting in the Cold War, a war that had no real physical fighting. Instead, the two countries both constantly threatened to use nuclear bombs on each other (but never did it) in the hopes of attaining global influence. The rivalry from the Cold War even led to a Space Race, which began when Russia sent the Sputnik 1, the first satellite, into space. During this time, both the U.S. and Russia tried to show their superiority by competing to achieve "firsts" in space exploration.
The Space Race led to many great technological achievements in space exploration. Here are just some of the achievements that NASA has accomplished in its 55 years, with many, many more to come.
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In honour of NASA, we conclude with one of the most famous phrases about space made popular by the science-fiction TV and film series Star Trek:
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It's five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
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