A U.S. government agency for space flight and aeronautical research, founded in 1958 by the National Aeronautics and Space Act.

Its headquarters are in Washington, D.C., and its main installation is at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA's early planetary and lunar programs included Pioneer spacecraft from 1958, which gathered data for the later crewed missions, the most famous of which took the first people to the moon in Apollo 11 on July 16-24, 1969.