NASA, celebrating its 65th anniversary, has rich legacy on Long Island

Sixty-five years ago Saturday, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 into law.

The agency he created, known then and now by the acronym NASA, would go on to play a pivotal role in Long Island’s aerospace industry and at its research institutions, sending 10 Long Islanders into the great expanse.

“For me, it’s hard to imagine astrophysics or cosmology without NASA’s involvement,” said Simon Birrer, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Stony Brook University. His work with associate professor Anja von der Linden and a team of international researchers uses images of a supernova taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to measure the expansion rate of the universe.

Birrer uses NASA grant money to fund his lab and terabytes of NASA data to do his work, he said. “If tomorrow NASA was gone, I don’t know what we’d have to do.  We would have to completely revamp.” 

One of the first articles Newsday published about the agency ran in June 1958 on an inside page, next to the horse picks for Belmont: “Civilian Unit to Direct Outer Space Race.” The agency's purpose was to “take over basic research and space exploration activities that aren’t primarily associated with weapons.”

There had been no recorded opposition in Congress, the article said, with one congressman noting America’s “bad second” place in the space race to the Soviet Union, which had in 1957 placed the Sputnik satellite into orbit around the Earth. Spaceflight was one mission of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, which started on Oct. 1, 1958.

LI AS 'SPACE CENTER'

The nation’s response was the Apollo space program to land a man on the moon. Defense contractor Grumman Corp. of Bethpage won a 1962 NASA contract to build the lunar module that astronauts used to land there in 1969.

As Grumman ramped up for a $1 billion order for 15 modules — each module a vehicle of 1 million parts — Nassau County Executive Eugene Nickerson was quoted in Newsday saying his county would become the “space center of the United States.” 

For a time, it seemed he was right: Grumman’s workforce swelled to 36,000 in 1969. Hundreds of subcontractors grew, too, across Long Island: Ambac Industries of Garden City, Aircraft Porous Media of Glen Cove, Fairchild Camera of Syosset. They played niche but critical roles in the mission, building components like tracking lights and gas filters for the modules.

But the moon program ended and Grumman lost its bid for a multibillion-dollar space shuttle development contract in 1972. By the 1990s, Grumman’s space role had diminished; the company was bought in 1994. 

Today, most of the old Apollo subcontractors no longer exist, having merged or been sold, said Andy Parton, president of the Cradle of Aviation Museum and Education Center in Garden City. But there are still about 500 aerospace manufacturers on Long Island, 100 of them active in the space industry.

The industry “is not dead on Long Island; it’s just different,” Parton said. “There are small aerospace manufacturing companies that have some involvement building parts for Mars Rover projects” and NASA’s Space Launch System subcontracting for SpaceX and the company now known as Northrop Grumman. 

THE NEXT GENERATION

Parton said the agency has done a poor job in sharing its mission and accomplishments with the public: major innovations in computing, solar power and medicine grew out of NASA research, he said. But he and his colleagues have noticed during holiday breaks an uptick in visitors: former Long Islanders who’ve gone on to work in private space companies, many of which partner with NASA.

“One of the products we’re producing is the next generation of engineers, and hopefully a new revitalized space program with Artemis will lead to more interest,” he said, referring to a program to return astronauts — including  Lt. Col. Jasmin Moghbeli, a former Baldwin resident — to the moon in the coming years.

She would be the 11th Long Islander sent to space, Parton said.  

Birrer and von der Linden estimated that 20 Stony Brook faculty members in a variety of fields use NASA resources in their research, along with dozens of graduate students.

Deep-space NASA projects like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope are expected to generate massive amounts of high-quality data yielding clues about “the age and composition of the universe, dark matter and dark energy,” von der Linden said. 

The scientists hope “this drive of curiosity … remains in U.S. society” to keep funding the agency’s mission, Birrer said.