NASA's Fortieth Anniversary: Pioneering The Future - 0 views
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Liberty High School on 24 Sep 10"The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) emerged in some measure because of the pressures of national defense during the cold war with the Soviet Union, a broad contest over the ideologies and allegiances of the nonaligned nations of the world in which space exploration emerged as a major area of contest. From the latter 1940s, the Department of Defense pursued research and rocketry and upper atmospheric sciences as a means of assuring American leadership in technology. A major step forward came when President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved a plan to orbit a scientific satellite as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) for the period, 1 July 1957 to 31 December 1958, a cooperative effort to gather scientific data about the Earth. The Soviet Union quickly followed suit, announcing plans to orbit its own satellite."