NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) is the civil space agency of the United States government. Congress created it in 1958, in the early months of the Space Race, by converting the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics into a new organization that opened for business on October 1 of that year. NASA went on to run the Apollo program Moon landings, fly the Space Shuttle for three decades, and assemble the International Space Station with 14 partner nations.
The agency is now in its second era of crewed lunar exploration. In April 2026 the Artemis program's Artemis II mission carried four astronauts around the Moon, the first crewed lunar flight since 1972.[1] NASA also closed out a turbulent year on the ground: Congress rejected a White House proposal to shrink the agency by roughly one quarter and instead appropriated 24.44 billion dollars for fiscal year 2026, and the Senate confirmed Jared Isaacman as the 15th administrator in December 2025 after a nomination saga that lasted more than a year.[2][3]
History
NASA's first human spaceflight efforts, Project Mercury and Project Gemini, put Americans in orbit and rehearsed the rendezvous techniques lunar missions would require. Apollo followed. On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon after launching atop a Saturn V, and five more crews landed before the program ended in December 1972.
The Skylab station hosted three crews in 1973 and 1974. The Space Shuttle then flew 135 missions between 1981 and 2011, deploying the Hubble Space Telescope and building the International Space Station; two crews were lost, aboard Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. After the shuttle retired, NASA shifted routine transportation to private industry. Commercial cargo deliveries to the station began in 2012, and the Commercial Crew Program restored crewed launches from American soil in 2020 through SpaceX.
Artemis and human spaceflight
Artemis is NASA's program to return astronauts to the Moon using the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft, whose service module is supplied by the European Space Agency. The uncrewed Artemis I mission looped around the Moon in late 2022.
Artemis II launched on April 1, 2026, with NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. The crew passed about 6,545 kilometers from the lunar far side on April 6, took more than 7,000 images of the surface, and reached 406,771 kilometers (252,756 miles) from Earth, breaking the crewed distance record Apollo 13 had held since 1970. They splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on April 10 after covering 695,081 miles.[1]
| Mission | Date | Profile |
|---|---|---|
| Artemis I | November-December 2022 | Uncrewed lunar flyby test of SLS and Orion |
| Artemis II | April 1-10, 2026 | Crewed lunar flyby; new crewed distance record |
| Artemis III | 2027 (planned) | Crewed Earth-orbit docking tests with lunar lander test vehicles |
| Artemis IV | 2028 (planned) | First crewed landing at the lunar south pole |
NASA restructured the next steps in June 2026. Artemis III, planned for 2027, is now an Earth-orbit mission in which Orion will rendezvous and dock with lander test vehicles from Blue Origin and SpaceX; its crew is Randolph Bresnik, ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano, Frank Rubio, and Andre Douglas. Artemis IV, planned for 2028, is slated to attempt the first crewed landing at the lunar south pole.[4] In low Earth orbit, NASA intends to operate the International Space Station until about 2030, after which a SpaceX-built deorbit vehicle will bring it down while commercial stations take over.
Science missions
NASA's science fleet spans every planet of the Solar System and reaches beyond it. The James Webb Space Telescope has observed the infrared universe from the Sun-Earth L2 point since 2022, while Hubble passed 35 years in orbit in 2025. The twin Voyager probes, launched in 1977, still return data from interstellar space. On Mars, the Perseverance rover is caching rock samples and the Curiosity rover has operated since 2012. Europa Clipper, launched in October 2024, is due at Jupiter in 2030 to survey the ice moon Europa, and New Horizons continues outward through the Kuiper Belt.
Much of this fleet was at risk in 2025. The administration's budget request proposed cutting NASA science by 47 percent, to about 3.9 billion dollars, and canceling dozens of missions. Congress instead funded science at 7.25 billion dollars, about 1 percent below the prior year, restoring missions including the DAVINCI and VERITAS Venus orbiters, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and New Horizons, and providing 300 million dollars to keep the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on track. Lawmakers also created a 110 million dollar Mars Future Missions program aimed at eventually returning Perseverance's samples.[2][3]
Centers and workforce
NASA is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and operates nine field centers plus the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a federally funded research center run for NASA by Caltech. Johnson Space Center in Houston hosts mission control and the astronaut corps, Kennedy Space Center in Florida handles launches, Marshall Space Flight Center leads propulsion work, and Goddard Space Flight Center manages many science missions. Ames, Glenn, Langley, Armstrong, and Stennis round out the list.
The workforce contracted sharply in 2025, when roughly 4,000 civil servants, close to one fifth of the total, accepted deferred resignation offers during the budget standoff. The agency also went nearly a year without a confirmed leader: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy served as acting administrator from July 2025 until Isaacman, a commercial astronaut who flew the Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn missions, was confirmed by a 67-30 Senate vote on December 17, 2025.[3]
Budget
The fiscal year 2026 appropriation passed the House 397-28 and the Senate 82-15 in mid-January 2026, giving NASA 24.44 billion dollars; separate supplemental funding enacted earlier brings the agency's total available for the year to about 27.5 billion dollars.[5] The Planetary Society, which campaigned against the proposed cuts, calculates the result is NASA's largest budget since fiscal year 1998 when adjusted for inflation.[2]
Commercial partnerships absorb a growing share of that spending. Under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, private landers such as Firefly's Blue Ghost, which landed in March 2025, carry NASA instruments to the Moon, and a Blue Origin lander is contracted to deliver the once-canceled VIPER rover to the lunar south pole in late 2027.[6]
References
- NASA Welcomes Record-Setting Artemis II Moonfarers Back to Earth - NASA.
- You just saved NASA's budget - The Planetary Society.
- Jared Isaacman is confirmed as NASA chief, a year later - NPR.
- NASA Marches Toward Artemis III Mission in 2027, Names Crew Members - NASA.
- Congress Passes Fiscal Year 2026 Spending Bills for NSF, NASA, and DOE - American Astronomical Society.
- NASA Selects Blue Origin to Deliver VIPER Rover to Moon's South Pole - NASA.