U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower meets with Dr. Wernher von Braun and other NASA scientists
July 29, 1958 — Dwight Eisenhower, no one's idea of an electrifying President, had an electrifying idea. Packed deep in federal mothballs was a little agency known as the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), established during World War I to help keep the U.S. abreast of advances in airplane technology. Ike proposed updating NACA by turning it into NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The new agency would be charged with designing boosters, inventing spacecraft and selecting and training the "astro-nauts" who would fly them. Creating a new bureaucracy was the easy part, of course. Actually accomplishing anything with it would be another matter.