[WATCH VIDEO: The Woman Who Helped Create NASA]
April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
In December of 1903, the Wright Brothers made history as they performed the world’s first heavier than air, powered controlled flight. Three years later, the woman who would help create NASA was born.
Eilene Galloway began her career as a researcher in the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress in 1941. Her duties included researching and writing House and Senate documents, including “Guided Missiles in Foreign Countries,” released just before the Soviets launched Sputnik in October 1957.
Amy Shira Teitel of Discovery News explains the drive to catch up with and surpass the USSR was spurred into being by that launch. “Sputnik shocked, frightened, and in some cases angered the United States. Not only was history’s first satellite a surprise, it opened a new arena in the Cold War and a new way for nations to prove their might over one another. The American military responded with a slew of manned spaceflight proposals. The Army, Navy and Air Force each developed plans to get a man into space before the Soviet Union.”
There was no singular agency in the US, however, to manage this deluge of proposals and push one through to completion. At first, Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) – a military division – to handle “certain advanced research and development projects” such as space technology. ARPA has since become DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But President Eisenhower was unhappy with the idea of a military space agency and almost immediately began working for a civilian agency.
In 1958, US Senator Lyndon B. Johnson asked Galloway to help with Congressional hearings that led to the creation of the civilian agency NASA and America’s cold-war entry into the Space Race. Galloway later said, “The only thing I knew about outer space at that time was that the cow had jumped over the Moon.”
Galloway helped to write the legislation that drove the US into space, eventually to land the first man on the moon — Neil Armstrong, who in a twist of fate carried a bit of fabric with him from the 1903 Wright Flyer that started our need to leave the ground — and host a crew on the International Space Station. President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act on July 29, 1958. NASA was officially born on October 1, 1958, less than one year after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. America was determined to never fall behind technologically again.
Galloway, who died in 2009 just short of her 103rd birthday, served as America’s representative in drafting treaties governing the exploration and uses of outer space. She launched the field of space law and international space law, and also served on nine NASA Advisory Committees.
Among Galloway’s other accomplishments are several decades serving with the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, and being instrumental in creating the International Institute of Space Law, which serves as the forum for legal scholars and others from around the world in studying and debating the legal issues associated with the exploration and utilization of space.
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