Why We Need NASA

We plan to land humans on Mars in the 2030s. We're getting set to send MAVEN to Mars and OSIRIS-REx to an asteroid, and we'll be watching as Juno arrives at Jupiter and New Horizons arrives at Pluto. We’ll launch the James Webb Space Telescope to follow Hubble in the quest to understand our universe, looking all the way back to the first luminous glows after the Big Bang. We’ll continue looking at the home planet from our unique perspective in space, improving air travel and developing cutting

To help humans reach an asteroid and Mars, we'll continue to evolve technologies like advanced solar electric propulsion, large-scale solar sails, new green propellants, and composite cryogenic storage tanks for refueling depots in orbit. These new space technologies will spawn new knowledge and capabilities to sustain our future missions.

NASA’s parallel path for human spaceflight also took a giant leap forward in September when the agency announced U.S. astronauts once again would travel to and from the International Space Station (ISS) from the United States on American spacecraft under groundbreaking contracts worked by NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The agency selected Boeing and SpaceX to transport U.S. crews to and from the space station using their CST-100 and Crew Dragon spacecraft.