July 29 · This Day in America
Ten months after a Soviet beach ball named Sputnik beeped over American rooftops and rattled a confident country, President Eisenhower signs the National Aeronautics and Space Act. It folds the old aeronautics committee into something new and deliberately civilian — not a weapon, but an agency "devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind." NASA opens for business on October 1, 1958, in borrowed office space, with a handful of laboratories and no rockets that reliably worked. Eleven years later one of its craft would set two Americans down in the gray dust of the Moon, the whole world watching, and the words it carried back would be about peace. It started here: a signature, a fear turned into a mandate, a nation deciding the sky was not the limit but the doorway.
Source: www.nasa.gov
Also on this day · 1967
A stray rocket fires across the crowded flight deck of the carrier Forrestal on Yankee Station and ruptures a fuel tank. Old bombs cook off in chains of explosions. Damage Control Team 8 runs toward the flames; their chief, Gerald Farrier, is killed in the first blast. 134 sailors die, 161 are hurt. From the wreckage came a hard-won inheritance: the Navy's modern firefighting schools and shipboard damage control, paid for in the worst way.
Source: www.history.navy.mil
“Activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind.”National Aeronautics and Space Act, 1958