NASA

Space agencyFounded 1958Washington, D.C., USA nasa.gov

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the civil space agency of the United States, established in 1958 in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. It runs the country's human-spaceflight, science and aeronautics programmes from a network of field centres including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard, Johnson and Kennedy. NASA operates flagship observatories (Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope), the Mars rover programme, the Voyager and New Horizons deep-space probes, and the US segment of the International Space Station. Its Artemis programme aims to return crews to the Moon. The agency funds most of its hardware through contracts with private aerospace primes.