The Space Task Group was a working group of NASA engineers created in 1958, tasked with managing America's human spaceflight programs. Headed by Robert Gilruth and based at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, it managed Project Mercury and follow-on plans. After President John F. Kennedy set the goal in 1961 for the Apollo Program to land a man on the Moon and bring him back safely to Earth, NASA decided a much larger organization and a new facility was required to perform the Task Group's function, and it was transformed into the Manned Spacecraft Center (now the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center), located in Houston, Texas.
In later years, the term Space Task Group was ambiguously reused to refer to an ad hoc committee appointed by the President to recommend human spaceflight programs, usually chaired by the Vice President. For instance, President Richard Nixon appointed such a group in February 1969 to outline a post-Apollo spaceflight strategy, chaired by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew.[1]
- ^ Compton, W. David; Benson, Charles D. (1983), "Chapter 5: Years of Uncertainty, 1967-1969", Living and Working in Space: A History of Skylab, vol. SP-4208, Washington, D.C.: NASA, p. 101