Edited by Stephen J. Garber, The NASA History Series, May 2001

Human spaceflight is the driver for most activities that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) undertakes. While NASA certainly has a rich aviation research heritage and has also done pathbreaking scientific and applications work using robotic spacecraft, human spaceflight is a difficult and expensive endeavor that engenders great popular enthusiasm and support for NASA. Much of this public interest stems from pushing boundaries of adventure, by exploring the unique and challenging physical environment of space. Humans can also perform tasks in space that machines cannot. We can think, analyze, and make judgment calls based on experience and intuition in real time.

In little more than forty years, we have gone from thinking, planning, and hoping that humans will enter space to having rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts permanently living aboard an International Space Station (ISS). We have moved from the Cold War, which set the historical context for superpower competition in space during the 1960s, to joint ISS missions involving over a dozen cooperating nations.

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