The National Aeronautical and Space Administration celebrated six decades of this year, but the agency responsible for putting up the first man on the moon is struggling to stay ahead of the competition
Agence France-Presse July 29, 2
Sixty years ago today, spurred by competitions with the Soviet Union, the United States created Nasa (the National Aeronautical and Space Administration), launching that would take Americans to the moon within a decade.
Since then, the US space agency has seen glorious achievement's and crushing failures in its drive to push the frontiers of space exploration, including a fatal launch pad fire in 1967 that killed three, and two deadly shuttle explosions in 1986 and 2003 that took 14 lives.
Now, Nasa is struggling to redefine itself in an increasingly crowded field of international space agencies and commercial interests, with its sights set on returning to space. These ambitious goals sound nice, but experts worry Nasa doesn’t have the money to meet the timelines of reaching the moon again in the next decade, and Mars by the 2030s.
