Facts about Nasa, the world’s biggest space agency

WASHINGTON : The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has the world’s largest budget for space exploration, with some 19 billion dollars budgeted this year alone for space missions and robotic research.

The US Congress created the space agency in July 1958 to challenge the former Soviet Union’s rise in the space race, one year after the Soviets launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into space.

The agency known as Nasa officially began operations on October 1, 1958.

Nasa employs some 19,000 people at its Washington headquarters and in its 10 command centers around the United States, as well as some 40,000 contractors.

The best known Nasa sites are the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where space shuttles are prepared and launched, and the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where the shuttle mission control and International Space Station operators are located.

Nasa designs its robotic missions to comets, Mars and other planets at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

In addition to the Apollo missions to the moon and the construction of the ISS through multiple shuttle missions, Nasa missions have including placing in orbit and then repairing the Hubble telescope, which revolutionized astronomy.

Other high moments for Nasa include missions to Mars by the twin robots Spirit and Opportunity, which landed in 2004, and the June 2008 launch of the Phoenix, a probe that confirmed the presence of water on Mars.

Last November, the space agency said it had found “a significant amount” of water on the Moon.

Nasa is in the process of winding down its long-running shuttle program, which is scheduled to end later this year.

The program was originally going to be superceded by the Constellation program, with plans for Constellation’s Orion capsule to return US astronauts to the moon by 2020 and eventually send them to Mars.

But President Barack Obama, who wants Nasa to partner with private industry to develop new ways to transport US astronauts to the ISS and beyond, scrapped the Constellation program.

Since July 2009 Nasa has been led by retired Marine Corps Major General Charles Frank Bolden.