On October 1958, XNUMX, the operations of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration began: in acronym, NASA. Officially founded on July 29 of the same year, when US President Dwight Eisenhower signed the law to establish it, the American space agency began work exactly 62 years ago.
Just over a year earlier, on October 4 of 1957, the USSR had launched it into orbit Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite. In the Cold War climate, Soviet superiority in the space race alarmed Congress, which urged the President to take action. The most important was the establishment of NASA, which absorbed the previous NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics).
For the next 15 years, the Agency's activity was mainly concentrated on three programmes: Mercury (1958-1963), Gemini (1961-1966) and most famous of all, Apollo (1961-1972).
The first great result came in 1961, when – with the Mercury 3 mission – the astronaut Alan Shepard he became the first American to go as far as space. The ballistic flight took place aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule, which departed from Cape Canaveral and was later recovered at sea.
The first spacewalk made in the USA instead it dates back to 1965 and it was Edward White. Even in this field, however, the Americans had been beaten by the Soviets, who in 1961 had sent Yuri Gagarin to fly around the Earth for 108 minutes.
NASA's redemption came only in 1969, with the mission Apollo 11. It was 22.17 pm Italian when Neil Armstrong, the first man in history to walk on the moon, uttered the famous phrase: "One small step for man, one giant leap for humanity".
The following year, however, came the most devastating of failures: the mission apollo 13, that of communication that has become a proverb: “Houston we have a problem”. The crew managed to return home after an oxygen tank failure 56 hours after launch caused many problems to various on-board systems, thus preventing the lunar landing.
Several steps forward followed in the following decades: in 1983 the first woman in space (Sally ride), in 1990 the launch of the space telescope Hubble (still active), in 1998 the first mission for the assembly of the International space station, in 2012 landing to Mars with the robot Curiosity.
And now? It's news from a few days ago the agreement between Italy and the United States on the program Artemis for the exploration of the Moon. The declaration of intent was signed at Palazzo Chigi by the undersecretary of the Prime Minister with responsibility for space policies, Riccardo Fraccaro, in connection with the chief administrator of NASA, Jim Bridenstine. Italy is the first European country to sign a bilateral agreement on lunar exploration with the United States.
