A NASA endeavour to answer the two most fundamental questions in astronomy and cosmology: Where did we come from, and are we alone? The Origins Program aims to explain how galaxies formed in the early Universe, to study the formation and evolution of stars and planetary systems, to understand how life begins and evolves, and to determine whether habitable or life-bearing planets exist around other stars.

Current space missions that come under the Origins Program are the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the Far-Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE), Kepler, a planet detector, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Forthcoming is the James Webb Space Telescope, a replacement for HST, in 2021. Beyond that are plans for the Single Aperture Far-Infrared Observatory, a follow-on to Spitzer, and the Large UV/Optical Telescope. After 2020 will come more ambitious telescopes such as Life Finder, to search for chemical signatures of life in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets, and Planet Imager, an array of space telescopes to achieve the imaging power of a telescope 360 km wide.