fliteline

Dissolving and transferring the assets to its successor, on this day in 1958, Dwight D Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act into law, creating NASA out of its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which was primarily responsible for establishing US air supremacy during World War, as a wholly civil venture to promote exploration and peaceable application of space science.
The Advanced Research Products Agency (ARPA) and successor DARPA constituted earlier in the same year would continue to champion military applications of rocketry and telemetry for defensive and offensive drills and operations. Precipitated by America being caught nearly entirely off-guard by the USSR’s launch of the Sputnik satellite, the agency signalled the full faith and support of the government for advancing science for its own sake—even if the underlying motives themselves were not purely academic.