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From International Astronautical FederationFriday 1 October 2010
This day in space historyOn 1 October 1958, NASA was formed. On 29 July 1958, President Eisenhower had signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). When it began operations on 1 October 1958, NASA consisted mainly of four laboratories and 8000 employees of the US government's 46-year-old research agency for aeronautics, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). NASA's early programmes were research into manned spaceflight, and were conducted under the pressure of the competition between the USA and the USSR (the Space Race) that existed during the Cold War. The Mercury programme, initiated in 1958, started NASA down the path of human space exploration with missions designed to discover simply if man could survive in space. On 5 May 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space when he piloted Mercury 3 on a 15-minute suborbital flight.
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