A Handbook for Employees

General-orientation handbook (NPC 103) issued to new NASA hires, opening with a welcome message from Administrator James E. Webb recounting the July 29, 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act and the agency’s October 1, 1958 founding, followed by seventeen sections on pay, working time, career development, benefits, retirement, and separation from service. Its “If You Have a Complaint” chapter states NASA policy plainly: “to promote and insure equal opportunity for all qualified persons, without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin,” backed by a Compliance Officer at headquarters and every field installation enforcing the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, and guarantees that raising a grievance will not itself be held against an employee. The cover art’s spacewalk and rendezvous-and-docking vignettes, alongside earlier Mercury capsule and X-15 imagery, point to a mid-1960s printing rather than the earliest 1961–62 edition, though the body text’s figure of roughly 19,000 employees suggests it carries over passages from an earlier revision predating NASA’s Apollo-era workforce peak of over 30,000.