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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Sixty years ago, on July 29, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act into law, paving the way for the official opening of NASA's doors just a few months later, on Oct. 1.

The drive to create an American civilian space agency began with the shocking revelation on Oct. 4, 1957, that the Soviet Union had beaten the US to the punch and launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, aboard an intercontinental ballistic missile. The USSR was quick to tout its success in launching Earth's "second moon."

"Sputnik 1 was a phenomenon: You could go see it in your backyard," recalled physicist and engineer Guy Stever, who was on the faculty of MIT at the time, in a 1992 oral history workshop on the origins of the law.

Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/how-nasa-got-its-start-60-years-ago-sputnik-eisenhower/

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