On October 1, 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration opened for business, absorbing the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics along with its 8,000 employees, its three laboratories at Langley, Ames and Lewis, and its budget of about 100 million dollars. Eisenhower had signed the Space Act on July 29. The NACA was 43 years old and had spent them doing aerodynamics research for aircraft makers and the military. It had no rocket programme.
The trigger was Sputnik, launched on October 4, 1957, and the American reaction to it, which was closer to panic than to policy. Eisenhower did not believe the satellite changed the strategic balance, and he wanted the space programme kept civilian so that reconnaissance and overflight work would not be confused with it. The act creating NASA also set up a separate National Aeronautics and Space Council, and it instructed the agency to expand human knowledge rather than to win a race, which is what the statute actually says.
Where NASA got its early work done was a set of institutions that came with it. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, run by Caltech for the army, was transferred in December 1958. Wernher von Braun's team at Huntsville, with the Redstone and Jupiter missiles it had built for the army, came across in 1960 and became the Marshall Space Flight Center. Project Mercury was announced within days of the agency opening.
The first years went badly. Vanguard blew up on the pad in December 1957, before NASA existed. Pioneer and Ranger probes were lost. Ranger needed 13 launches before it returned a usable picture of the Moon. Alan Shepard flew a 15-minute suborbital hop in May 1961, three weeks after Gagarin had orbited the earth, and John Glenn orbited in February 1962.
Kennedy's commitment to a lunar landing, given to Congress in May 1961, fixed the budget, which went from about 500 million dollars in 1960 to more than 5 billion by 1965, roughly four per cent of federal spending at the peak. Apollo 11 landed in 1969. The agency has kept humans in orbit continuously since 1998 through the International Space Station, which is the largest object ever assembled off the planet.