BREVARD COUNTY — Oct. 1 marks 60 years since the establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.

Sixty years later, Americans have the Kennedy Space Center, we have been to the moon and we are planning human missions to Mars.

 

Walking down Bob Sieck's hallway at his home in Viera is like going through the history of NASA.

Sieck started just as the space agency was getting started. He began with the Gemini program, tasked with figuring out how to get an astronaut's health vitals in space transmitted back down to Earth.

"Today when you go in a hospital and you see a nurse or practitioner watching a dozen patients at a station remotely, you can thank the space program for that," said Sieck.

In the Apollo program, he worked on the spacecraft that would send the first men to the moon.

Then he would then become one of 10 to serve as a space shuttle launch director, giving the final go for launch.

"The only number that's important is the number of landings, I'm thankful is the same number of launches," said Sieck.

Sieck has seen the highest highs and lowest lows at the space agency. Now that he has retired, he is concerned NASA is too worried these days about making mistakes.

"The probability of launching back when I started, being a spectator, was one in three: You'd either launch, scrub or blow up, really," he recalled. "Nowadays, a test flight has got to go perfectly or it's portrayed as another failure."

However, he believes the men and women at the space agency will be able to take America farther into the stars.

"It's optimistic from the standpoint that whatever mission or task they're given, they'll get it down," said Sieck.

Space lovers have to wait a long time for the next big NASA mission.

Next year, humans will once again launch from Florida's Space Coast on commercial rockets, with the aid of NASA.

In addition, the space agency is currently developing the spacecraft and systems that will be able to return humans to the moon in the next decade and to Mars in the 2030s.