NASA has a long and grand history — the agency turns 100 in 2015 — making amazing strides in space exploration and discovery, and pushing the United States farther beyond Earth’s boundaries every year. It’s celebrating a big milestone on Dec. 20, 2014, the 75th anniversary of Ames Research Center.

At the time it was built, in 1939, Ames was created as the second lab for what was then the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics or NACA. (It became NASA in 1958.) The facility, located in Silicon Valley in California, saw much discovery within its walls, especially early on.

“Ames researchers broke new ground in all flight regimes (the subsonic, transonic, supersonic and hypersonic) through construction of increasingly sophisticated wind tunnels, research aircraft and methods of theoretical aerodynamics,” NASA explains. Those wind tunnels still exist, and research still happens at Ames today.

In addition to keeping up with the areas it traditionally researched, the Center “confronted new challenges and new programs emerged,” notes the NASA Ames History Office. Programs like astrobiology, which is, simply put, studying the origins and future of life in the universe. Piece a cake.

This past fall, NASA went all out for the birthday celebration, inviting common folk to tour the facility, getting a backstage look at places and objects — one of the massive wind tunnels, a huge centrifuge, for example — usually off limits to the public. We thought in honor of this anniversary, we’d pull together our own backstage pass to space exploration in the United States. The slideshow above includes photos of Ames in its early days, plus many other space successes.

Note: Captions feature information from NASA.

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