The Apollo program was the third human spaceflight program carried out by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ( NASA ), the United States ' civilian space agency.

The program was named after the Greek god of light, music, and the sun by NASA manager Abe Silverstein, who later said that " I was naming the spacecraft like I'd name my baby.

" While NASA went ahead with planning for Apollo, funding for the program was far from certain given Eisenhower's ambivalent attitude to manned spaceflight.

So Gilruth was given authority to grow his organization into a new NASA center, the Manned Spacecraft Center ( MSC ).

It was also clear NASA would soon outgrow its practice of controlling missions from its Cape Canaveral Air Force Station launch facilities in Florida, so a new Mission Control Center would be included in the MSC.

Coleman was selected by NASA in 1992 to join the NASA Astronaut Corps.

* 1984 – NASA conducts the Controlled Impact Demonstration, wherein an airliner was deliberately crashed in order to test technologies and gather data to help improve survivability of airplane crashes.

Remote Agent ( remote intelligent self-repair software )( RAX ), developed at NASA Ames Research Center and JPL, was the first artificial intelligence control system to control a spacecraft without human supervision.

Livingstone2 was flown as an experiment onboard Earth Observing 1, and an F-18 at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center.

The Explorer program was transferred to NASA, which continued to use the name for an ongoing series of relatively small space missions, typically an artificial satellite with a science focus.

Armstrong's FM system was used for communications between NASA and the Apollo program astronauts.

The acronym FAQ was developed between 1982-1985 by Eugene Miya of NASA for the SPACE mailing list.

The first commercial use of fuel cells was in NASA space programs to generate power for probes, satellites and space capsules.

Galileo was an unmanned NASA spacecraft which studied the planet Jupiter and its moons.

NASA engineers were able to recover the damaged tape recorder electronics, and Galileo continued to return scientific data until it was deorbited in 2003, performing one last scientific experiment — a measurement of the moon Amalthea's mass as the spacecraft swung by it.

An earlier project which received some significant planning by NASA included a manned fly-by of Venus in the Manned Venus Flyby mission, but was cancelled when the Apollo Applications Program was terminated due to NASA budget cuts in the late 1960s.

JPL was transferred to NASA in December 1958, becoming the agency ’ s primary planetary spacecraft center.

It was while working as a consultant for NASA that Lovelock developed the Gaia Hypothesis, for which he is most widely known.

In early 1961, Lovelock was engaged by NASA to develop sensitive instruments for the analysis of extraterrestrial atmospheres and planetary surfaces.

The Skylab project, managed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Marshall Space Flight Center, was seen by the Manned Spacecraft Center ( later Johnson Space Center ) as an invasion of its historical role as the NASA center for manned spaceflight.

She is also part of the band Bandella, which also includes fellow NASA astronaut Steven Robinson, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, and Micki Pettit ( astronaut Don Pettit's wife ).

Click and Clack have also been featured in editorial cartoons, including one where a befuddled NASA engineer calls them to ask how to fix the Space Shuttle.

General relativity also predicts the existence of gravitational waves, which have since been observed indirectly ; a direct measurement is the aim of projects such as LIGO and NASA / ESA Laser Interferometer Space Antenna and various pulsar timing arrays.

NASA has also looked to utilize hydroponics in the space program.

NASA also concluded that aeroponically grown plants requires ¼ the nutrient input compared to hydroponics.

" NASA also reported in 2009 that the LCROSS probe revealed an ultraviolet emission spectrum consistent with hydroxyl presence.

NASA also has a resident office at the facility staffed by federal managers who oversee JPL's activities and work for NASA.

A number of Mercury boilerplate spacecraft ( including mockup / prototype / replica spacecraft, made from non-flight materials or lacking production spacecraft systems and / or hardware ) were also made by NASA and McDonnell Aircraft.

It also provides illuminating insight to the culture at NASA.

Since 1996, however, the collection has also included oral histories of senior NASA administrators and officials, astronauts, and project managers, part of a broader project to document the lives of key agency individuals.

Because of its early loss, Challenger was the only space shuttle that never wore the NASA " meatball " logo, and also was never modified with the MEDS " glass cockpit ".

Food was also important ; early Apollo crews complained about its quality, and a NASA volunteer found living on the Apollo food for four days on Earth to be intolerable ; its taste and composition, in the form of cubes and squeeze tubes, were unpleasant.

Lobbying by the astronauts and senior NASA administrators also had an effect.

It also found itself popular among the academic world for research and analysis of audio, and for more clandestine operations, such as speech analysis and manipulation by the intelligence services, submarine sonar and sound analysis by the Navy, flight simulators for Boeing, and even by NASA as the core of the digital camera system on board the Galileo Probe sent to study and photograph Jupiter and its moons.

Ames also develops tools for a safer, more efficient national airspace and unique partnerships benefiting NASA ’ s mission.

The NASA Ames Research Center wind tunnels are known not only for their immense size, but also for their diverse characteristics that enable various kinds of scientific and engineering research.

The United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration's ( NASA ) MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer ( MODIS ) also gives information on the cirrus cloud cover by measuring reflected infrared radiation of various specific frequencies during the day.

These two space probes were built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, and they were paid for by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ( NASA ), which also paid for their launchings from Cape Canaveral, Florida, their tracking, and everything else concerning the space probes.

It also included a NASA Exhibit that included models and mockups of various satellites, as well as the Project Mercury capsule that had carried Alan Shepard into space.

A similar concept, also named SSTV, was used on Faith 7 as well as on the early years of the NASA Apollo program.

NASA also has an oblique chevron in its " meatball " logo.