Origins and development of NASA's exobiology program, 1958–1976

Abstract

Following NASA's founding in 1958, the American space agency was quick to embrace exobiology as an important goal. In July 1959 NASA's first administrator, T. Keith Glennan, appointed a Bioscience Advisory Committee, which reported in January 1960 that NASA should not only be involved in space medicine, but also should undertake the search for extraterrestrial life. In the spring of 1960 NASA set up an Office of Life Sciences. By August it had authorized the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to study the type of spacecraft needed to land on Mars and search for life. In order to study chemical evolution, the conditions under which life might survive, and a variety of related issues, NASA's first life sciences lab was set up at its Ames Research Center in California in 1960. In 1962 the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences set the search for extraterrestrial life as “the prime goal of space biology”. The search for life beyond Earth in many ways became a driver of the American space program, and these early events were the essential underpinnings that led to the landings of two Viking spacecraft on Mars in 1976. Despite the failure to find life unambiguously, research in exobiology continued and was transformed two decades later as astrobiology.