NASA's Next Frontier

On Wednesday, Elon Musk’s venture SpaceX launched its first foray into deep space — with NASA by its side. Just before sunset, SpaceX’s rocket Falcon 9 carried NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory, also known as DSCOVR, beyond Earth’s atmosphere. DSCOVR will travel toward the sun and send critical data back to Earth every 15 to 60 minutes. Its findings will help scientists predict catastrophic space weather events that could impact telecommunications, aircraft and GPS systems here on Earth.  

It’s just the latest adventure in a decades-long journey to outer space that began as a Cold War battle between the United States and Russia.

In 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite … and the space race was on. The next year, President Eisenhower created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration … and determined to one-up the Russians.

Eisenhower got a U.S. satellite into orbit that year, but it took the Russians launching the first man into space for things to really take off. And they did, with a big promise from a newly elected John F. Kennedy: that an American man would soon walk on the moon.

Kennedy made good on that promise eight years later, in 1969, when Neil Armstrong took one small step onto the surface of the moon that became one giant leap for America’s space exploits.

Forty-two years and more than 100 missions later — marred by the tragic explosions of space shuttles Challenger and Columbia — America’s space shuttle program was shut down. Many Americans thought that marked the end of the United States’ space endeavors altogether.

But DSCOVR’s launch proves that America hasn’t ended its love affair with the wider universe.

So, what does the United States’ future in space hold? To find out, check out the video above, so that when it comes to NASA’s final frontier, at least you can say, “Now I get it.”