LibGuides: Technical Reports: NASA and NACA Reports

Basics on Finding NASA and NACA Reports

When searching for NASA and NACA reports, remember that NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) got its start in 1915 and was renamed NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1958.

The NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) provides full-text access to most NACA publications and many NASA publications. As of April 2021, a change with the product made indexing unreliable; be sure to check other options for access to reports.

TRAIL (Technical Reports Archive & Image Library) has both NASA and NACA reports.
National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (Cranfield University) is a NACA archive.

For a more sophisticated search tool, though with coverage only back to 1965, we think of:

Aerospace Database This link opens in a new window
Indexing to help identify NASA (and other aerospace research materials) dating back to 1965.
Updated monthly. Includes the renowned Aerospace Database and provides full-text titles from around the world, including scholarly journals, trade and industry journals, magazines, technical reports, conference proceedings, and government publications. For those researchers who need to conduct comprehensive literature reviews, this database includes specialized, editorially-curated A&I resources for discovery of relevant scholarly research and technical literature critical to the discipline.

As the reports were published, the University Libraries received many NACA reports in print and then many NASA reports. These came first in print and then most were in microfiche. We think of going first to the Internet repositories but sometimes the library collections may come in handy.