Organization
ActiveNASA
Washington, D.C. · Since 1958
Still the United States' civilian space agency, and still a large technical employer and a customer of private contractors.
A later timeline chapter projects a role for this organization. That chapter is a projection. This page is about the institution as it exists, or as it existed.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration opened in 1958, built from the earlier National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and given the civilian space program after Sputnik. It is an agency, not a company. It employs scientists, engineers, astronauts, and a much larger number of civil servants and contractors who never leave the ground.
NASA's labor history is a history of contracts. The centers, at Houston, Huntsville, the Cape, and Pasadena, direct work that private firms carry out. The agency is the customer and the standard. The factory is often someone else's.
Who is on the badge
A NASA center mixes civil servants with contractors who sit in the same building and cannot be paid the same way. That split is the occupation: the government engineer who writes the requirement, and the company engineer who meets it. Astronauts are a tiny fraction of the headcount. Technicians who stack a vehicle, and the safety staff who can stop a countdown, are the work. Any chapter about a space economy that counts only the people in orbit has missed the building.
Still the customer
NASA is still funded, still hiring, and still buying launches from companies such as SpaceX. The 2045 and 2070 chapters project a larger commercial sector in which the agency remains the standard-setter. Those chapters are projections. The agency is not. It has been a public employer since 1958.
The work it organized
- Flight controller
- Contractor engineer
- Technician
- Safety officer
On the timeline
Related
- The European Space AgencyActive
- SpaceXActive
- Lockheed MartinActive