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Sixty years ago, stimulated by competition with the Soviet Union, the United States created NASA, the starting point for a space adventure that would take them to the moon.
Today, the agency struggles to reinvent itself Since its birth, NASA has challenged the limits of space exploration but has also experienced resounding failures, such as the explosion of two ferries in 1986 and 2003, with the balance of 14 dead
His ambition to return to the deep space will face a funding problem, which would prevent him from returning to the Moon in the next decade and to March in the 2030s.
NASA became dependent on the private sector and has contracts with SpaceX and Boeing to send astronauts into space as of 2019, as soon as their spaceships will be ready.
The agency can not send astronauts alone into space since 2011, when it closed its space shuttle program after 30 years.
She now has to pay $ 80 million per seat to Russia to send Americans to the International Space Station (ISS) in a capsule of Soyuz
The Beginnings
In 1957, the Soviet Union sends its first satellite in space with Sputnik 1, while US attempts, mainly under the auspices of the army, fail miserably
for the time, Dwight D. Eisenhower, then asked Congress to create a separate civil space agency. On July 29, 1958, he signed the law establishing NASA 's National Aeronautics and Space Authority.
The Soviets won a new round in April 1961, when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. A month later, the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, announced his intention to send a man to the moon in the late 1960s. Thus was born the Apollo program
In 1962, Astronaut John Glenn He became the first American to place himself in the Earth's orbit. And in 1969, Neil Armstrong goes into history as the first man to walk on the moon.
"Apollo was a unilateral demonstration of the power of a nation," recalls John Logsdon, professor emeritus of the Space Policy Institute of George Washington University.
"That Kennedy decided to use the space program as a declared instrument of geopolitical competence, that is what made NASA a national political instrument, with a very large budget allocation", was he told AFP. Apollo era, no less than 5% of the national budget went to NASA. Today, this proportion has risen to less than 0.5% of the federal budget (about 18,000 million dollars a year), and NASA no longer has the same weight in national politics, according to Logsdon. .
NASA he experienced other moments of glory in the 1980s, as the birth of the space shuttle program, and then in 1998, with the start of operations of the ISS.
But what's going on today? Donald Trump defended the return to the moon, mentioning a lunar gateway that allows a continuous stream of spacecraft and people visiting the satellite
Alliances with China and Israel will be key
Instead of compete with space agencies According to Teasel Muir-Harmony, curator of the National Museum of Air and Space, "the focus has been on cooperation" to reduce costs and promote l & # 39; innovation.
NASA's highest authority, Jim Bridenstine, reiterated that he wants to work with other countries with interests in space. He mentioned the possibility of strengthening cooperation with China and said that he had recently traveled to Israel to meet groups working on a lunar lander.
His predecessor, Charles Bolden, warned of the risk of re-offending ferries, when the United States ended their program with no other spacecraft ready to take over.
"We can not tolerate another emptiness like this," said Bolden
. In 5 years, NASA plans to spend about 10 billion US dollars on lunar exploration with a budget of nearly 20 billion by 2019.
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