NASA

Overview

NASA — the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — is the United States’ civilian space agency. It officially began operations on October 1, 1958, after President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act the previous July, creating the agency to lead America’s civilian space program in response to Soviet advances in space exploration (NASA History Office). Its first administrator was T. Keith Glennan, with Hugh L. Dryden as deputy; the new agency incorporated the 43-year-old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) — 8,000 employees and a $100 million annual budget — and within days began work on America’s first human spaceflight program (NASA History Office).

The standard histories end around Apollo, the Shuttle, and the ISS. This profile leads with what no standard overview yet foregrounds: April 2026’s Artemis II — the first crewed Orion flight, setting a new human distance record — flown in the same year Congress fought off a historic budget cut and NASA’s own watchdog warned the agency was dangerously dependent on a single spacesuit contractor.

Artemis II: the first crewed Orion flight

In April 2026, Artemis II launched on a nearly 10-day voyage around the Moon, marking the first crewed flight of NASA’s Orion spacecraft (NASA). Aboard were NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen (NASA). The crew traveled 252,756 miles from Earth — a record for the greatest distance humans have traveled in space — and observed the lunar surface “like never before” (NASA).

The flight followed Artemis I, the successful uncrewed test flight of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion in November 2022 (NASA). What comes next: Artemis III, a 2027 low-Earth-orbit demonstration to evaluate commercial human landing systems developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin, testing the rendezvous and docking operations needed for lunar surface missions; Artemis IV, with the first Artemis lunar landing still targeted for 2028 — a date consistent since mid-2025; and Artemis V in 2028, sustaining a cadence of one mission per year thereafter (NASA).

The budget fight Congress won

Artemis II flew against a backdrop of fiscal warfare. In May 2025, the Trump administration’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget request proposed cutting NASA’s funding by 24 percent — and NASA science by 47 percent — which the Planetary Society’s Casey Dreier called “historic cuts… going out of business kinda cuts” that would have canceled or defunded more than 40 active and planned science missions (Astronomy).

Congress rejected the proposal almost entirely. An appropriations minibus carrying a $24.4 billion NASA budget cleared the House 397–28 and the Senate 82–15 on January 15, 2026 (Astronomy). Senator Ted Cruz had earlier secured a $10 billion amendment for Artemis, the SLS, and Orion in the administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (Astronomy). With supplemental funding, NASA’s effective FY2026 resources approach $27 billion — the largest in 30 years when adjusted for inflation — restoring funds for missions the proposal would have killed, including the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, New Horizons, Juno, and the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin rover (Astronomy). The Gateway station received $1.1 billion in the FY2026 budget (Astronomy). Newly confirmed Administrator Jared Isaacman publicly committed at his December nomination hearing to “maximizing the scientific value of every dollar afforded by Congress” (Astronomy).

The spacesuit problem: NASA’s reliance on Axiom

While the budget fight was won, NASA’s own Inspector General was warning about a different vulnerability. After nearly two decades of failed in-house and contractor attempts at next-generation spacesuits, NASA awarded Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) contracts to Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace in 2022, worth up to $3.1 billion — with NASA purchasing spacewalking services (essentially renting the suits) rather than owning them (NASA OIG).

In 2024, Collins and NASA mutually agreed to descope Collins’ task orders, citing schedule failures, after $37 million had been spent — leaving the agency reliant on Axiom to deliver both the lunar and ISS microgravity suits (NASA OIG). The OIG found NASA’s original goals — demonstrating the lunar suit in 2025 and the microgravity suit in 2026 — “overly optimistic and unrealistic”: both suits are at least a year and a half behind schedule, with Axiom planning demonstration readiness for late 2027, though at historical testing averages the demonstrations wouldn’t occur until 2031 (NASA OIG). The OIG concluded NASA had made “risky management decisions” in structuring the competition, and warned that if Axiom cannot satisfy its contractual requirements “in a timely or cost-effective manner,” the agency could be forced to significantly adjust its lunar and spacewalking plans (NASA OIG).

JPL, Caltech, and the agency’s structure

NASA’s most distinctive institutional relationship is with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech and is NASA’s only federally-funded research and development center (JPL). JPL built Explorer 1, which launched in January 1958 to become the first American Earth-orbiting satellite — producing the first scientific result from space, the discovery of the Van Allen Radiation Belts (JPL). Later that year NASA was founded, and JPL was transferred to the agency by the Army, remaining under Caltech management (JPL).

Today JPL operates the Deep Space Network — the giant dish antennas that send and receive data from nearly all spacecraft beyond the Moon — runs 40 active missions, and employs roughly 5,500 people at its Pasadena, California campus (JPL). Across the agency, 10 field centers work together on NASA’s missions, from the agency’s first headquarters in the Dolley Madison House on Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C., to today’s centers nationwide (NASA History Office).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state NASA’s current civil-servant headcount — published figures were not verified in a fully-read source this pass. It does not give the specifics of the FY2027 budget request; only that the next proposal loomed as advocates celebrated the FY2026 win. It does not assert the later-2026 status of the Gateway station beyond the fully-read January 2026 reporting that funded it at $1.1 billion — conflicting claims of cancellation were seen in SERP leads but not verified in a fully-read source. The Artemis III–V dates are NASA’s stated targets as of 2026, not guarantees.