NASA and the Environment

While the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is widely perceived as a space agency, since its inception NASA has had a mission dedicated to the home planet. Initially, this mission involved using space to better observe and predict weather and to enable worldwide communication.

Meteorological and communication satellites showed the value of space for earthly endeavors in the 1960s. In 1972, NASA launched Landsat, and the era of earth-resource monitoring began.

At the same time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the environmental movement swept throughout the United Sates and most industrialized countries. The first Earth Day event took place in 1970, and the government generally began to pay much more attention to issues of environmental quality.

Mitigating pollution became an overriding objective for many agencies. NASA’s existing mission to observe planet Earth was augmented in these years and directed more toward environmental quality.