 The year was 1903. Orville and Wilbur Wright had a vision to fly. Only 12 years after that historic first flight of the dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the United States Congress began to organize a national aeronautics research effort. In March of 1915, this effort became known as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics or NACA. Ground was broken for the first NACA facility on July 17, 1917. This center would be named the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory after Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley, a 19th century inventor, aviation pioneer, and competitor of the Wright Brothers. This laboratory, one of the world's premier space and aviation research facilities, would become known as the Langley Research Center in the years to come. Langley Research Center has evolved today into one of the leading aerospace research laboratories in the world. Welcome to NASA Langley Research Center. Located in Hampton, Virginia, NASA Langley is the first and oldest NASA facility in the country. Langley began contributing to the U.S. space program as early as 1940. Project Mercury was born at NASA Langley in the 1950s. Over the last 75 years, Langley Research Center has made contributions to flight, flight research, and the tools and instruments used in the development of aeronautic and aerospace industries. Since 1958, when NASA was formed, Langley Research Center has made significant contributions in the training of scientists and managers, thereby strengthening the entire infrastructure of our nation's aerospace industry. Langley personnel formed the core staff for many of the other NASA facilities. Today, there are nine major NASA field centers directed by the headquarters office located in Washington, D.C. Research laboratories include Langley in Hampton, Virginia, the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Ames Research Facility in Mountain View, California. Test flight facilities include Wallops located on Wallops Island, Virginia, and Bryden in Edwards, California. Kennedy Space Center in Florida serves as the primary site for test, checkout and launch of space vehicles and payloads. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas manages the space shuttle program and has a lead role in space station development. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama emphasizes projects involving investigation and application of space technologies, as well as problems on Earth and in space. Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland designs, fabricates and tests satellites that survey the Earth, the Sun, and the Universe. While the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California is involved with activities associated with deep space scientific missions, engineering subsystems, instrument development and data reduction and analysis required by deep space flight. And finally, the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, where large rocket propulsion systems are tested, as well as research programs involving space, oceans and the Earth take place. Here at NASA Langley, our mission is simple to provide basic research in aeronautics and space technology to create conceptual designs and theories. Four primary elements make up Langley Research Center, our people, our facilities, our budget and our relationship with others. The center employs approximately 3,000 civil service employees, as well as 2,500 support service contractors, university staff members and a contingent of 100 military people from the Army helicopter research group. About one half of our workforce has earned master's degrees and about 20% have reached doctoral level. Our facilities are currently valued at about $2 billion. Langley has over 40 wind tunnels, the highest concentration of wind tunnels in the western world. These wind tunnels, used for testing scale models of aircraft, are capable of simulating wind speeds from 0 miles per hour up to Mach 25 or about 17,500 miles per hour, which is equal to orbital velocity. Langley's annual budget is approximately $600 million, of which over 300 million is set aside for research. The remaining funds operate facilities and pay salaries. The main product of the center is the knowledge and information which we provide to others. The information generated through research at Langley is passed on to industry, universities and other government agencies. Information is also passed on to the general public as spin-off applications of aerospace technology research, such as grooved highway pavement to prevent hydroplaning and the fetal heart rate monitor to ensure quality prenatal healthcare. Here at NASA Langley, researchers focus on tomorrow, today. We are dedicated to long-term basic research as well as to high-risk problem solving. In the increasingly competitive world of the future, it is clear that maintaining America's preeminence in science and technology will once again test our nation's technical vision, resolution and institutional strengths. We at NASA Langley must stimulate advances across a broad spectrum of aerospace sciences and technologies critical to America's future. NASA Langley will aid private enterprise and strengthen American educational institutions by developing those resources which support the evolution of human aspiration.