NASA Langley Research Center has a long legacy of innovation and established many of the basic building blocks of aeronautics including changing the shape of aircraft and helping allow jets to fly at supersonic speeds. Later Langley Research Center added space exploration to its repertoire. Langley started Project Mercury and the Space Task Group, which oversaw the burgeoning U.S. space program. In the years that followed when the U.S. decided to develop a reusable spacecraft, NASA turned again to Langley researchers to put space shuttle designs through thousands of hours of wind tunnel testing. Today NASA Langley researchers carry on the legacy of their pioneering predecessors. Whether it is testing airbags for space capsule landings, developing technologies to allow aircraft to fly at supersonic and hypersonic speeds or studying Earth’s atmosphere to better understand global climate change, NASA Langley remains on the leading edge.