President Eisenhower and NASA administrator T. Keith Glennan examine photographs taken by TIROS-1 in April 1960, less than two years after Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act.

Courtesy Dwight D. Eisenhower Library __1958: __President Eisenhower signs the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The plot had thickened months before.

Beep … beep … beep …

They were steady, almost metronomic, signals coming from a tiny radio beacon orbiting the Earth every 96 minutes aboard an aluminum sphere measuring a mere 22 inches across. In an instant, everything changed.

It was Oct. 4, 1957, when the Soviet news agency Tass announced to a stunned world that the Soviet Union had successfully placed Elementary Satellite 1, known by its diminutive "Sputnik," into an elliptical orbit some 550 miles above a Cold War–wracked planet.

American scientists attending a reception at the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., that day knew their Russian colleagues were close. With luck, the thinking went, the USSR might launch a satellite sometime in 1958. But the Americans were close, too. Their Vanguard program, run by the Naval Research Laboratory, was beset by cost overruns and various delays, but they were confident that they would be first into space.

That illusion was completely shattered Oct. 4, which is remembered as "Sputnik Night." While getting Sputnik into orbit didn't suddenly confer technological supremacy upon the Russians, it was nevertheless a remarkable achievement – and an enormous propaganda coup. For the moment, at least, communism had trumped capitalism on a major front, and the conceit that America stood unequaled in the technological sphere was shaken.

When, less than a month later, the Russians put the larger and much-heavier Sputnik 2 into orbit, with the dog Laika aboard, genuine alarm set in. Now there was talk of a growing technology gap. There were also fears in U.S. military circles that these satellites might be capable of pinpointing targets for a Soviet nuclear-missile attack.

The Space Age was dawning badly for the United States.

The pressure for a U.S. riposte grew. It only intensified with a failed attempt to launch the Vanguard TV3 satellite in December 1957. It was the Army that finally got the United States off the schneid. Wernher von Braun, a key scientist in Nazi Germany's rocket program, was now working for the U.S. Army, along with a number of his former German colleagues brought to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip. They convinced the Pentagon to set Vanguard aside and bet the ranch on the Army's still-untested Project Explorer.

Explorer 1, launched atop a Juno 1 rocket Jan. 31, 1958, was the first American satellite to achieve orbit. Although it was much smaller than Sputnik 2 and only a few pounds heavier than the original Sputnik, Explorer 1 was a badly needed success. It also marked the beginning of the space race in the national consciousness.

Explorer 1 and the subsequent launching of Vanguard 1 mitigated, but did not efface, the sting of Sputnik. And it did nothing to stave off a comprehensive reorganization of the U.S. space program. The Eisenhower administration, working with an often-fractious Congress, got nowhere, so Ike (in between tee times, his detractors would say) directed his science adviser, James Killian, to convene a committee and come up with a game plan.

The first step was to reinvigorate the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, a rather geeky and elitist civilian panel that had been around since 1915, by handing it all nonmilitary responsibilities connected to space exploration. As NACA's charter grew, the decision was made to expand it into a full-fledged government agency taking direct responsibility for the nation's space program.

President Eisenhower signed the legislation creating NASA on July 29, and it officially became a functioning entity Oct. 1, with T. Keith Glennan as its first administrator. There were 8,000 employees (inherited from NACA), three research laboratories – Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, Ames Aeronautical Laboratory and Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory – and an annual budget of $100 million. (That's about $750 million in today's money, compared to a 2008 budget of more than $17 billion.)

The agency's mission statement will have faint echoes for Star Trek fans: "To improve life here, to extend life there, to find life beyond."

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To mark the 50th anniversary of NASA's birth, Wired.com has created a special package of features:

Source: Various

Sputnik Stunned the World, and Its Rocket Scared the Pentagon

April 9, 1959: America Meets Its 7 Original Astronauts

July 20, 1969: One Small Step ... One Giant Leap ...

April 17, 1970: Houston, We No Longer Have a Problem

Jan. 28, 1986: Challenger