More of This NASA Innovations Feature • Launching NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration • Early NASA Spaceflights: Mercury and Gemini • Going to the Moon - NASA Project Apollo • NASA Space Shuttle • The "First A in NASA:" Aeronautics Research • Applications Satellites

More Material on Rockets • The History of Satellites • The Evolution of Rockets - Timeline • The History of Rockets and Space Travel Innovations • Spacesuits

NASA did pioneering work in space applications such as communications satellites in the 1960s. The Echo, Telstar, Relay, and Syncom satellites were built by NASA or by the private sector based on significant NASA advances.

In the 1970s, NASA's Landsat program literally changed the way we look at our planet Earth. The first three Landsat satellites, launched in 1972, 1975, and 1978, transmitted back to Earth complex data streams that could be converted into colored pictures. Landsat data has been used in a variety of practical commercial applications such as crop management and fault line detection, and to track many kinds of weather such as droughts, forest fires, and ice floes. NASA has been involved in a variety of other Earth science efforts such as the Earth Observation System of spacecraft and data processing that have yielded important scientific results in such areas as tropical deforestation, global warming, and climate change.

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by Stephen J. Garber and Roger D. Launius