NASA

NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is the civil space and aeronautics agency of the United States. It was established in 1958 and works from headquarters in Washington, D.C., with flight research and planetary science distributed across field centres including Langley, Armstrong and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Uncrewed flying vehicles

This site catalogs four NASA vehicles that fly with nobody aboard. Ingenuity was a small coaxial helicopter carried to Mars by the Perseverance rover; it made its first flight in April 2021 and completed 72 flights before the mission ended in January 2024. Dragonfly is a rotorcraft lander designed, built and managed for NASA by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, with launch planned no earlier than July 2028 and arrival at Saturn's moon Titan expected in late 2034. The X-43A was an uncrewed hypersonic research aircraft flown under the Hyper-X programme; it reached about Mach 9.6 on its final flight in November 2004. The X-34 was a reusable technology demonstrator built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, which flew only in tow and captive-carry tests before NASA cancelled the programme in March 2001.

Current position

NASA continues to fund rotorcraft and hypersonic flight research alongside its crewed programmes. Its uncrewed flight vehicles are typically developed with industry partners and university laboratories rather than built entirely in-house.