Goddard Space Flight Center
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Maryland
NASA established its first space flight center on May first, nineteen fifty-nine, in Greenbelt, Maryland, a few miles northeast of Washington. It was initially called the Beltsville Space Center, organized from four divisions including the Vanguard Division, which had been working on the nation's early satellite program. The center was renamed Goddard Space Flight Center to honor Robert Goddard, the physicist widely regarded as the father of modern rocketry.
Goddard's official dedication came in nineteen sixty-one. Its original charter covered five missions: technology development, scientific research, planning, technical operations, and project management. It became the nerve center for America's earliest unmanned space science, and today manages hundreds of NASA missions. The center sits on more than one thousand acres and employs roughly ten thousand civil servants and contractors.
