Science Run by the State: Ten Government Agencies From 1846 to 2003

The Smithsonian was created by act of Congress in 1846 to carry out the bequest of James Smithson, a British scientist who left his estate to found an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men, though he had never visited the United States. It is where the path begins because a government accepted a private legacy and made research and public museums its permanent job.

The Met Office began on 1 August 1854 as a small department within the Board of Trade under Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy, set up as a service to mariners. Its first aim was to collect weather data for ships, not to forecast, and FitzRoy later pushed it to issue the first public daily forecasts, a step some of the scientific establishment of the time thought overreached what the data could support.

Congress created the United States Geological Survey on 3 March 1879 as a scientific agency of the Department of the Interior, to classify public lands and examine the geological structure and mineral resources of the national domain. It now maps terrain and monitors earthquakes, volcanoes, water and landslides, which shows how a survey of land grew into a standing observation service.

The Naval Research Laboratory opened in Washington in 1923 at the instigation of Thomas Edison, as one of the first United States government scientific research and development laboratories. It is the corporate research laboratory of the Navy and Marine Corps, with specialties such as plasma physics, space physics and materials science, so it shows basic science carried out inside a military service.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was founded in 1936 by researchers of the California Institute of Technology and is now owned and sponsored by NASA while Caltech manages it. Its main work is building and operating robotic planetary spacecraft, and it runs the NASA Deep Space Network, so it is an example of a government laboratory run by a university.

The National Science Foundation was established on 10 May 1950 when President Harry S. Truman signed the National Science Foundation Act. Unlike the agencies before it, it does not mainly run its own laboratories: it is an independent agency that funds basic research and education across nearly every field of science and engineering, medicine excepted.

ISRO began as the Indian National Committee for Space Research, set up in 1962, and was renamed ISRO in 1969. It is the national space agency of India, serving as the research and development arm of the Department of Space, and it operates imaging, communications and remote sensing satellites along with the GAGAN and IRNSS navigation systems.

The European Space Agency was founded in 1975 in the context of European integration, and it is a 23-member international organisation with its headquarters in Paris. It is the only international body on this path, pooling the budgets of its members for missions to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Mercury and the Sun, and it maintains Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.

The Korea Aerospace Research Institute was established in 1989 as the aeronautics and space agency of South Korea, with its main laboratories in Daejeon. Its projects include the 1999 Arirang-1 satellite and the KSLV-2 launcher, and since May 2024 it has been an affiliated research institute of the Korea AeroSpace Administration.

JAXA was formed in 2003 through the merger of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, the National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan and the National Space Development Agency of Japan. Its missions include the Hayabusa asteroid missions, the SELENE lunar orbiter and the SLIM lander, and it developed Kibo, the largest module of the International Space Station.