NASA at 50

For the Gulf Coast aerospace corridor, anything concerning NASA should be of high interest. This is home to NASA’s John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and the Michoud Assembly Facility. And a lot of the facilities here, like the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, have ongoing projects with NASA.

There's an excellent but long piece in Aviation Week and Space Technology written about the space agency's 50 years. It points out that NASA is facing challenges comparable to those the agency faced at the end of the Apollo program.

Today the agency faces another gap as one program ends and another begins, and money is again an issue. The war on terrorism is gobbling up resources, and now the financial problems and the bailout promise to make it even tougher.

It's a long read, but well worth it if you're interested in NASA, where it's been and where it may be going. Story.