Key documents relating to NASA’s founding: this page includes documents from Monograph No. 10, NASA’s Origins and the Dawn of the Space Age.

Key documents relating to Sputnik, Vanguard, Explorer, and the International Geophysical Year: This site includes both U.S. and Soviet documents from the mid- to late 1950s, setting the historical context for NASA’s founding.

National Aeronautics and Space Act (NASA’s “charter”)

• Original version signed by President Eisenhower (high-res PDF)
• Unamended original (HTML)
• Amended

Toward a Rationale for a National Space Program: this study by the Rand Corporation dates from July 1959. For the Web, it is broken into two halves of true-graphics PDF files. Click here to see part one and here to see part two.

Other key space policy documents

Historical sites and landmarks (link to come).