Nasa's 60 Years of Exploration and Discovery

By Edward Goldstein

Having been born two months after Sputnik, and spent most of my professional career working for the agency, its contractors and the major aerospace industry trade association, I have a special affinity for NASA. One of my earliest historical memories is of the live television coverage of John Glenn’s Mercury Friendship 7 launch in 1962 – coverage that President John F. Kennedy approved over the advice of cautious aides who worried about the impact to the space program of a launch explosion.

The magic of NASA, of course, is that its power to inspire reaches all Americans and billions of people throughout the world who aren’t intimately involved with the space program.

You can see the impact of NASA in the many people one can view on public streets throughout the country and abroad wearing t-shirts or polos bearing the iconic NASA meatball logo.

You can measure NASA’s influence on the public as a portal to scientific engagement by the 88 percent of adult Americans – 216 million – who viewed the August 2017 solar eclipse, often with guidance from NASA’s public outreach efforts.

You can sense NASA’s power to inspire dreams of lives lived with great purpose by the record number of 18,300 citizens who applied for the 12 – yes 12 – slots in its latest class of astronauts.

You are presented evidence that NASA is held within high esteem within the federal government by the fact that the agency consistently tops the list of the best federal places to work in the annual survey of the Partnership for Public Service.

And you just know that NASA is more than an ordinary government agency, by the fact that practically everyone you talk to will tell you of where they were, and what they felt, when they witnessed an indelible moment spun from a bold NASA mission.

For my generation, the sight of Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong taking humankind’s first steps on an extraterrestrial body in 1969 was that moment. I’m more partial, however, to the incredible Christmas Eve of 1968 when the crew of Apollo 8 – Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders – live broadcast from lunar orbit the first close-up views of the Moon’s forbidding surface, reading from the Book of Genesis in a grace note to a year of war, assassination and civil unrest. And there was more. That same evening, in an unplanned moment, William Anders took the famous “Earthrise” photo that help spark the environmental movement, and a new consideration of our place in the universe. Anders told me when recalling the mission, “I think that one of the things that has not really emerged from that flight but one day will, is that our Earth is quite small, almost physically insignificant, yet it is our only hope. …I’ve thought and said it’s too bad we couldn’t put all the members of the U.N. in orbit around the Moon to look back at the Earth so that they could see how delicate our planet is, and we ought to quit fighting over it.”

I was not alone in viewing Apollo 8 as a special moment in the pantheon of NASA’s firsts. When interviewing former President George H.W. Bush for NASA’s 50th anniversary, President Bush told me that his son Jeb was irked at having to attend Christmas Eve church services, but upon returning home and seeing the astronauts’ broadcast was profoundly affected. “It was a lifechanging experience for him,” the 41st president said.

Over the decades, NASA has produced many such moments:

• From 1969-1972, the visits of six astronaut crews to the lunar surface, including three missions aided by an ingenious exploration enabler – the 11.2 miles per hour maximum speed Lunar Rover. Over time, the demands of the Apollo program for advanced microelectronic circuitry for its spacecraft helped give birth to Silicon Valley. And throughout NASA’s existence, microelectromechanical systems, supercomputers, microcomputers, software and microprocessors were all created with technology developed by NASA.

• The 1977 launch of Voyagers 1 and 2, the robotic spacecraft that jointly explored all the giant outer planets, 48 of their moons and the unique system of rings and magnetic fields those planets possess. As an added bonus, both Voyagers contained a 12-inch gold-plated phonographic record that thanks to the late Carl Sagan conveyed through sounds and music the story of our civilization to any extraterrestrials who, like modern Americans, still have an interest in vinyl.

• The 1981 first launch of the Space Shuttle Columbia on STS-1, the most daring test mission NASA has flown, which proved the concept of a reusable spaceship designed for routine low-Earth orbit operations. I was fortunate enough to witness Columbia’s unpowered winged landing at Edwards AFB in California, as the Rockwell International (prime Space Shuttle contractor) host for the first Chinese space delegation to officially visit the United States. The then-modest Chinese space program had only a couple of satellite launches under its belt at that time. The senior official from the Chinese delegation didn’t speak English but his broad smile when he shook my hand after Columbia landed bespoke NASA’s tremendous power to generate good will for our country.

• The 1990 deployment from the Space Shuttle Columbia of the Hubble Space Telescope, the first of NASA’s four great observatories along with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (1991), Chandra X-Ray Observatory (1999) and Spitzer Space Telescope (2003). All have recorded images and obtained data that have helped dramatically alter our understanding of the universe. The mother of NASA’s space astronomy program and the first key advocate for a large observatory in space is Nancy Roman, the brilliant astrophysicist who was told by her Swarthmore College physics professor in a view typical of her time, “You know, I usually try to convince women not to go into physics, but I think you might make it.”

• The launch in 1998 of the first element of the International Space Station (ISS), followed by the launch in 2000 of the Expedition 1 crew to the International Space Station, the football field-sized facility that has greatly enabled microgravity research and technology development, Earth observations, and the human factors research needed to send astronaut crews to Mars. Because of the ISS, we’ve had humans living and working in space permanently for 18 years.

• The 2014 test flight of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Module, the vehicle designed to take astronauts on missions beyond low- Earth orbit. Orion and the in-development Space Launch System are designed to allow NASA to send human missions to the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, the next step in sending humans back to the Moon, for sophisticated long-term operations, and onward to Mars.

For those space enthusiasts frustrated that we aren’t at Mars yet, or that hundreds of people are not living in space, someone who takes the long view of history might respond by noting that it took 115 years from the time Columbus first came to the New World to the establishment of the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia. Viewed in this light, let’s appreciate how far and how fast NASA has come. When NASA was first established in 1958, there was no human space program, no large rocket in place, only three legacy facilities from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) – the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Virginia, the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Ohio and the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory in California – and the equivalent of a $732 million budget in today’s dollars, or 0.1 percent of the federal budget. (Incidentally, while NASA’s budget peaked at 4 percent of the federal budget for two fiscal years (1965-1966), at the height of the Space Race with the Soviet Union, the space agency has in recent years been only allocated roughly 0.5 percent of the federal budget, a far cry from the massive amounts the public seems to believe are given to NASA, as illustrated in several polls.) But what the fledgling space agency did have were incredibly talented NACA legacy people, the likes of spacecraft designer Maxime Faget, flight controller Christopher Kraft Jr., Space Task Force leader Robert Gilruth, who John Glenn told me was his unsung hero, and yes, the launch and flight trajectory “Hidden Figures” wizard Katherine Johnson. From its infancy, NASA had the advantage of people whose abilities matched the magnitude of the task ahead.

Even from the start, the promise of the space program to advance U.S. exploration, scientific and technological interests was clearly recognized. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the 1958 report to the nation “Introduction to Outer Space,” wrote, “(There are) many aspects of space and space technology…which can be helpful to all people as the United States proceeds with its peaceful program in space science and exploration. Every person has the opportunity to share through understanding in the adventures which lie ahead. This statement [of the President’s Science Advisory Committee] makes clear the opportunities which a developing space technology can provide to extend man’s knowledge of the earth, the solar system, and the universe. These opportunities reinforce my conviction that we and other nations have a great responsibility to promote the peaceful use of space and to utilize the new knowledge obtainable from space science and technology for the benefit of all mankind.”

Following the shock of Sputnik, Eisenhower pushed for the creation of a civilian space agency to carry out an open program of scientific activities and to engage in international cooperation to enhance U.S. prestige and leadership – a vivid demonstration of the idea of “soft power.” He also wanted a civilian space agency to draw attention away from clandestine efforts to develop the military Corona spy satellite. Eisenhower approved the first NASA man-in-space program, Project Mercury, and dictated that the first seven astronauts come from the ranks of military pilots, but resisted attempts to give NASA a larger mission.

It was President John F. Kennedy, who had little initial interest in space, who determined that we would have to defeat the Soviet Union in the “Space Race” after the headline-making first human flight of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and the humiliating defeat of an American-backed Army invading communist Cuba in the Bay of Pigs. In his May 25, 1961 address to Congress, Kennedy called for the goal of placing a man on the Moon “before this decade is out,” and albeit less remembered, for investments in the ambitious Rover nuclear rocket (never developed), and satellites for worldwide communications and worldwide weather observations, a nod to the larger purposes NASA fulfills.

Kennedy is often viewed by space enthusiasts as the great champion of space, whose inspirational leadership on behalf of NASA hasn’t been matched since. The reality is more complex. Yes, Kennedy initially was all-in for the Moon initiative. In a November 1962 tape-recorded White House meeting with James Webb, the NASA Administrator who the current NASA boss, Jim Bridenstine, believes was the best NASA leader has had – as many others in the field also agree – Kennedy argued that while space applications and scientific activities were desirable, they were a lesser priority than the lunar program. When Webb labeled the lunar program “one of the top priorities” including the knowledge that could be developed in several scientific disciplines, Kennedy demurred. “Jim, I think it is the top priority. I think we ought to have that very clear. Some of these other programs can slip six months or nine months and nothing strategic is going to happen. But this is important for political reasons, international political reasons. This is, whether we like it or not, in a sense a race. If we get second to the Moon it’s nice, but its like being second any time. So, that if we’re second by six months because we didn’t give it the kind of priority, then of course that would be very serious. So, I think we have to take the view that this is the top priority.” But a year later, in a September 1963 address to the United Nations General Assembly, Kennedy wondered why the U.S. and Soviet Union should carry out “parallel efforts that would include duplication of research, construction, and expenditures.” Kennedy then said, “Why, therefore, should man’s first flight to the Moon be a matter of competition,” in offering to cooperate with the Soviet Union on a Moon voyage. The son of then Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev later said his father was prepared to accept Kennedy’s offer. But Kennedy’s assassination two months later left the proposal as one of history’s great what ifs.

There is one other aspect of the Kennedy era that bears retelling. Sometimes NASA’s story is viewed as being separate from the social and cultural changes that were overtaking our country in the 1960s. That was never the case. Take for example the issue of civil rights. In researching a 2002 speech to the National Technical Organization – the professional organization for African American engineers – that was to be given by NASA Deputy Administrator Fred Gregory, one of the three first African American astronauts, I discovered in the NASA archives a 1962 letter that James Webb sent to Werner von Braun, the German rocket scientist who led NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center. Webb’s letter informed von Braun that he had just been called on the carpet by Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy due to the lack of progress at Marshall in the hiring of “qualified Negroes” for technical positions, and told von Braun that he expected results. An audience member came up to Gregory after he relayed this story in his speech, and with a gleam in his eye said, “I was hired at the Kennedy Space Center (then known as the Launch Operations Center) as a result of that letter!” And since that time, NASA has striven to throw out the broadest possible net in recruiting talented scientists, engineers, administrators and astronauts.

On July 20, 1969, our planet stood figuratively still as two young Americans – Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin – set foot on the Moon’s surface at Tranquility Base. This signal American and NASA triumph was viewed by a global television audience, with the exception of the people of China, North Korea and North Vietnam, whose leaders denied them the opportunity to see Armstrong take “One small step for (a) man. One giant leap for mankind.” One American in Vietnam at that time, John McCain, the uninvited guest in the prisoner of war camp known as the Hanoi Hilton, later related how he learned about the Moon landing as a result of a slip up in a propaganda broadcast meant to sap his spirit and that of his fellow POWs. “In that brief mention of glorious news, our morale soared,” wrote McCain in 2012 upon Armstrong’s death, “We felt almost physically strengthened as we communicated with each other in whispers and tap code: “Did you hear that? Did you? We put a man on the Moon. My God, we did it.” McCain noted that when he told Armstrong this story when they met years later, this modest “brave man who made his countrymen proud … seemed moved by the recollection.”

There has been recent controversy about the Neil Armstrong biopic First Man, because it doesn’t include the epic image of Armstrong and Aldrin planting the American flag on the Moon, based on the filmmakers’ view that Apollo 11 deserves to be viewed as a global, not solely American, triumph. In truth, the crew’s actions and words on the Moon reflect both American pride, with the flag planting and televised phone call from President Richard Nixon in the White House, and a spirit of global brotherhood. Armstrong’s words about the “giant leap for mankind,” were influenced by direction from NASA Headquarters, NASA Chief Counsel Paul Dembling, the author of NASA’s enabling legislation told me. Dembling said he and three colleagues – Willis Shapley (associate deputy administrator), Arnold Frutkin (assistant administrator for international affairs), and Julian Scheer (assistant administrator for public affairs) – “worked on a statement regarding what should be said. The fear was that somebody might say, ‘I’m taking this for the United States,’ which would be contrary to what the Outer Space Treaty said. So rather than leave it to the astronauts to make up their own idea, there was the thought that maybe we ought to give them something that might lead them. I don’t think he [Neil Armstrong] said it exactly the way it was written down, but he transmitted the meaning.” And once at a NASA Headquarters lunch, Buzz Aldrin related to me that left on the Moon at Tranquility Base was a goodwill message signed by all the world’s leaders, some 70 at the time.

With the triumph of Apollo came a public sense of “let’s move on,” and President Richard Nixon made a number of consequential decisions in that direction, including cancelling the final three scheduled Apollo moon landings, forgoing human travel to Mars, postponing serious planning for a space station, and greenlighting the Space Shuttle program with the idea of making the costs of space activities less expensive and more sustainable for scientific, commercial and national security purposes. Nixon also toyed with the idea of using NASA as a domestic technology agency. The Space Shuttle program largely lived up to its promise, with milestone missions such as the first launch of the European Spacelab Module for enabling advanced scientific missions (1983), the first untethered spacewalk with astronauts Bruce McCandless and Robert Stewart (1984), the first satellite repair mission of the malfunctioning Solar Maximum Mission (1984), the deployment of the Galileo satellite mission to Jupiter (1989), the mission to repair the faulty optics of the Hubble Space Telescope (1993) – which involved five intensive spacewalks, and the first docking with the Russian Mir space station (1995). With triumph also came tragedy: the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger crew (STS-51L) in 1986 during launch and the Space Shuttle Columbia crew (STS-107) during reentry. In both tragedies, as was the case with the loss of the Apollo 1 crew during a launch rehearsal test in 1967, NASA and its contractors learned hard lessons about problems that were left to fester and the warnings of engineers that went unheeded. Fortunately, throughout these tragedies the public has been willing to allow NASA to take corrective action and move forward, and the space agency has demonstrated a genuine commitment to self-improvement.

The Space Shuttle experience, which featured strong cooperation between NASA and its partners with the European Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency, Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and eventually the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos, helped pave the way for NASA to lead the formation of the partnership that led to the International Space Station (ISS), permanently occupied since November 2000, which now involves the participation of 15 countries. Five years ago, at the 64th International Astronautical Congress in Beijing, NASA Space Station program scientist Julie Robinson listed ten significant scientific achievements from ISS activities:

• Saving astronauts from much of the troubling bone loss experienced during long-duration weightlessness with a combination of diet, vitamin D and exercise.

• Understanding the metabolic processes that lead to osteoporosis and developing medications and therapies for prevention.

• Using optical instruments to assess water quality in the world’s coastal bays.

• Manipulating nanoparticles with electrical fields through the self-assembly of colloids.

• Combustion research that is revealing more efficient processes of fuel consumption.

• Studies that reveal increased virulence of bacteria in space. The findings point to possible vaccines, perhaps one to combat salmonellla.

• The engagement of millions of students with science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning through interactions with ISS astronauts and with ISS science missions.

• Studies of dark matter using the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, an external observatory installed by space station astronauts in 2011.

• Improvements in robotics accomplished with the ISS’s Canadian-built robot arms that are leading to improvements in brain surgery techniques.

• Using the weightless environment to develop drugs that can attack specific tumors with chemotherapy.

The last decade has seen NASA’s steady development, with the support of commercial partners, of the launch vehicles, crew vehicles and other spacecraft that will once again see NASA aim its exploration sights higher, in the vicinity of the Moon, on the lunar surface with extensive surface operations that may involve the extraction of lunar resources to provide the consumables (including water), fuels, propellants and materials that will enable the industrialization of near Earth space, and eventually for humans to send expeditionary missions to Mars. Space Policy Directive One, issued by President Donald Trump last December, instructs NASA to “lead the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations.” In NASA’s plan to implement the policy, its exploration campaign combines the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion Multi-purpose Crew Vehicle with the development of a cislunar habitat called the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, and the development of lunar landers of increasing capability, ultimately leading to human manned landers and lunar facilities. As NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine recently tweeted: “We are committed to lunar exploration @NASA….More landers. More science. More exploration. More prospectors. More commercial partners. Ad astra!”

For at least 50 years, Mars has been viewed as the next logical target for NASA’s human exploration ambitions. And while many in the space community wistfully say that we always seem to be 20 years away from the red planet in NASA’s reckoning, the fact is that NASA developed hardware such as the SLS and Orion, combined with detailed planning undertaken by NASA’s Human Exploration Mission Directorate through its Design Reference Architecture 5.0, and technology investments in high power solar electrical propulsion and cryogenic propellant storage and transfer, is demonstrating that the building blocks are steadily being put in place to engage in a serious attempt – given a greater national and international commitment – to send humans to the most Earth-like planet in our solar system. The return to the Moon, said Bridenstine, “will allow us to prove and advance technologies that will feed forward to Mars,” such as precision landing and life support systems, that “will enable us to land the first Americans on the red planet.” Although there is yet no firm commitment for human Mars exploration, NASA’s 5.0 architecture document discusses at length potential landing sites such as Eberswalde Crater, which preserves a Martian river delta system and could hold evidence of early life embedded in its rock record, and Jezero Crater, where a standing body of water existed during the Noachian period, an early time in the planet’s history.

As much as the story of astronauts and the human exploration of space is central to the 60-year NASA narrative, so also is the remarkable record of accomplishment by the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, and the orbiters, landers, rovers, telescopes and sensors that have led to fundamental discoveries in planetary exploration, astrophysics, Earth science and heliophysics, and of its NACA-heritage Aeronautics Mission Directorate.

Largely because of NASA’s robotic missions, we now know there are many locations in the solar system – Mars, Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, and Saturn’s moon’s Titan and Enceladus – that may have had in the past or currently harbor microbiological life. And NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, planned for launch in the 2022-2025 time frame, will study Europa and the ocean beneath its icy surface for signs of extant life.

In NASA’s six decades we’ve come from speculation about whether there are planets orbiting nearby stars in the Milky Way galaxy, to the Kepler Space Observatory’s confirmation, along with that of other telescopes, of more than 3,000 exoplanets, including several potential Earth analogue planets that orbit within habitable zones of the stars they orbit. When the James Webb Space Telescope is launched in 2021, Nobel Prize Laureate and Senior Project Scientist John Mather told me, it will have the capability to image a planet transiting a nearby star “and measure the chemical constituents of the atmosphere of that planet. We’re pretty sure we can see if there’s water vapor — enough to have an ocean underneath. We should be able to tell if there are clouds and various other things. In good cases, we should be able to look at Earthlike objects.”

Because of NASA, the question of whether we are alone in the universe, once the province of philosophical speculation, is now in the realm of epistemology, or the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.

The development of science based on the potential discovery of extraterrestrial life is just among the major NASA contributions to planetary science and astrophysics. At the time of NASA’s founding, “Our level of knowledge of the solar system was so primitive by today’s standards that it is almost incomprehensible how far it has come,” Alan Stern, NASA’s former associate administrator for space science, told me. “We did not know, for example, what the appearances of most of the planets and their satellites were. We didn’t know that worlds in the outer solar system would be diverse. We didn’t realize that there are numerous oceans in the solar system, with most of them on the inside of planets. We didn’t know that the third zone of the solar system, the Kuiper Belts, exists. We didn’t know what the comets were. We didn’t know that ring systems are ubiquitous and that they come and go with time. We did not know that Venus is a tropic wasteland, 700 degrees Kelvin. We didn’t know the importance of giant impacts. And we just didn’t understand that most of the solar system’s planets are in fact dwarf planets — like Pluto. We basically didn’t know anything.” Now, thanks to NASA, we know.

Similarly, thanks to NASA’s commitment to the construction of large observatories and other telescopes in space, we have witnessed a new era of scientific discovery that has transformed human understanding of the universe. One of those telescopes, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, launched in 1989, confirmed that our universe originated from the expanding fireball known as the big bang. John Mather, of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, was one of two recipients of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics in recognition of his role as COBE principal investigator. “The COBE satellite discovered that the Big Bang theory is basically right, although it should be called the Expanding Universe theory,” Mather told me, “People misinterpret the word. They say, ‘Big Bang,’ and they should say, ‘Infinite Bang.’ ‘Big’ just isn’t big enough. … Now we have the most amazing ability to calculate with tremendous precision from the conditions of the early universe to now. I had no clue that would be possible when we proposed that project back in 1974.” Of course, there is also the tremendous legacy of accomplishment from the Hubble Space Telescope, arguably the most important astronomical instrument since Galileo Galilei’s modest telescope discovered the moons of Jupiter. Among Hubble’s key findings are the following:

• The accurate estimation of the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years.

• The finding, based on observations of distant supernovae, that the expansion of the universe may be accelerating.

• The confirmation that black holes are probably common to the centers of all galaxies.

• Observations of the collision of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994.

• The discovery of proto-planetary disks in the Orion Nebula, providing evidence for the presence of extrasolar planets around sun-like stars.

• The finding that Jupiter’s moon Ganymede has a subsurface saltwater ocean.

• The Hubble Deep Field, Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, and Hubble Extreme Deep Field images, revealing galaxies billions of light years away, providing a new window on the early Universe.

As much as NASA’s outward looking focus has led to profound discoveries like those mentioned above, perhaps its most societally beneficial role has been to mount a comprehensive Earth Observation System (EOS) program to understand the interactions that affect our home planet’s climate, oceans, atmosphere and land masses. Through the broad objectives of the program, EOS has been successful on a number of fronts, including:

• Pioneering new Earth-monitoring technologies.

• Successfully launching and operating a constellation of sophisticated EOS satellites that provide the scientific community 24 key climate measurements.

• Utilizing Earth measurements to improve climate models and to enhance monitoring and understanding of extreme events such as hurricanes and tsunamis.

Michael Freilich, who for over a decade headed NASA’s Earth Science Mission Directorate, told me that “using data from Earth-observing satellites, NASAsupported researchers are monitoring ice cover and ice sheet motions in the Arctic and the Antarctic; quantifying the short-term and long-term changes to Earth’s protective shield of stratospheric ozone, including the positive impacts of the Montreal protocols; discovering robust relationships between increasing upper ocean temperature and decreasing primary production from the phytoplankton that form the base of the oceans’ food chain; and using a fleet of satellites flying in formation [the ‘A-Train’], making unique, global, nearsimultaneous measurements of aerosols, clouds, temperature and relative humidity profiles, and radiative fluxes. Our improved understanding of Earth system processes leads to improvements in sophisticated weather and climate models, which in turn, when initialized using the satellite data, can be used to predict natural and human-caused changes in Earth’s environment over time scales of hours to years.’

One of my NASA heroes, the astronaut Piers Sellers, who was the director of the Earth Science Division at the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center until his untimely death from pancreatic cancer two years ago, said the following to an audience at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in 2004:

“Our technical ability to view the Earth from space is incident with our ability to change our planetary environment. So at the very time we are able to see our planetary home in its entirety, we are powerfully motivated to do so — to understand how the Earth system works, to help us assess the kind and degree of changes, both manmade and natural, that are ongoing, and ultimately to help us predict the future consequences of these changes. …The public and their representatives in government need better information on which to base all kinds of decisions involving the planetary environment; from targeting famine relief in Africa during droughts, to the continuing discussion on global climate change. Satellite observations provide the sole means to observe the whole planet almost every day using the same instrument.”

NASA’s Heliophysics Division, often out of the public spotlight, had its well-deserved moment in the sun, so to speak, during last year’s solar eclipse, when the space agency and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) combined to mount over a dozen operating missions studying and tracking the eclipse. Madhulika “Lika” Guhathakurta, NASA’s lead scientist for the eclipse, mentioned to me that “the exceptionally large land mass of this total eclipse will provide an unprecedented opportunity for cross disciplinary studies of the sun, Moon, Earth, and their interactions.” She notes the whole field of heliophysics as developed by NASA, other scientific agencies and research universities, has important practical implications. “We often have radio blackouts, disturbances in the ionosphere caused by x-ray emissions from the Sun. Then we have solar radiation storms, elevated levels of radiation that occur when a large-scale magnetic eruption on the Sun, often causing a coronal mass ejection and associated solar flare, accelerates charged particles in the solar atmosphere to very high velocities. When you have a major solar radiation event, you have to be concerned about what’s happening in near- Earth space with respect to satellites, to astronauts on the International Space Station and lower down to high altitude passenger airlines. The third category (of solar events) is a geomagnetic storm, a disturbance in the Earth’s magnetosphere caused by a solar wind shock wave that interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field. Through ground conductance this shock wave can affect electric transformers and render critical systems useless for a while in either a complete collapse or blackout. So being able to give people working in critical sectors enough time with forecast warnings to take mitigation steps is very important. NASA missions like STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory), SOHO (NASA/ESA Solar Heliospheric Observatory), Solar Dynamics Observatory, Advance Composition Explorer (ACE) along with NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) provide such warning, further demonstrating NASA’s societal relevance.

While the scope of NASA’s activities is helping to extend humanity’s scientific reach to the edges of the observable universe, true to the agency’s heritage, NASA’s Aeronautics Mission Directorate continues to do the essential work of contributing to the safety and efficiency of the airplanes we fly in every day. Indeed, it is no stretch to say that NASA has provided the experimental capabilities and facilities used in the development of practically every domestically produced commercial transport in the past 60 years, with innovations such as the supercritical wing, which reduces drag, increases flying efficiency and helps lower fuel costs; winglets, which increase an aircraft’s range and save billions of dollars in fuel costs; the digital “fly-by-wire” system, which replaced heavier and less reliable hydraulic systems with a digital computer and electric wires to send signals from the pilot to the control surfaces of an aircraft. And today, through its 10-year New Aviation Horizons initiative, NASA aeronautical research is paving the way for the low-polluting, low-noise supersonic aircraft of aviation’s next great era. “All of our aeronautics research has at its core service to the nation,” said Jaewon Shin, NASA’s associate administrator for aeronautics research. “What we’re doing should ultimately benefit American citizens, whether it’s safer and cleaner skies or next-generation air travel. But to make those advances you first have to understand the basics. That’s why aeronautics research is so important.”

Although now at the age of many baby boomers, the great thing about NASA is that it is by no means an institution headed into a quiet retirement or content to rest on its laurels, as its ambitions to extend its exploration reach and scientific quest for extraterrestrial life attest. NASA at its best is a bold, adventurous organization, seeking to carry the torch of exploration and discovery to heights unimagined and into frontiers unknown. Perhaps NASA’s outsized role in our society was explained best by Neil Armstrong when he said, “Mystery creates wonder, and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.”