NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is the body responsible for coordinating the US space effort. It came into being on October 1, 1958, taking over and expanding research and operational facilities that had previously come under the auspices of NACA. That body, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, had been set up in 1915 to coordinate aviation research in the US. One of the first acts of the new, civilian NASA was to announce, just seven days after its formation, a manned space flight programme, Mercury. Since that time, it has guided the US aerospace effort, through a multitude of triumphs - and a few tragedies, dispatching astronauts to the Moon and space probes beyond the Solar System into interstellar space. Best known of NASA's facilities is the John F Kennedy Space Center in Florida, named after the US president who urged the Nation to fly to the Moon. Built for the Apollo Moon shots, it is now the space shuttle's prime launch site. The main training centre for shuttle astronauts is the Lyndon B Johnson Space Center at Houston, named after Kennedy's vice president, who took over the reigns of office after his tragic death by an assassin's bullet in 1963. Johnson is also the home of manned space flight mission control. The Robert H Goddard Space Flight Center at Greenbelt is NASA's communications centre, handling satellite tracking and control and data-processing. It is named after the US rocket pioneer, who fired the world's first liquid-propellant rocket in the 1920s. The George C Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville saw the development of the mighty Saturn rockets under its director Wernher von Braun. It is currently heavily involved in the shuttle and space station programmes. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena built the first US satellite, Explorer 1, and is now preeminent in the design and operation of space probes like Voyager.
