Concept
NASTRAN is a finite element analysis (FEA) program that was originally developed for NASA in the late 1960s under United States government funding for the aerospace industry. The MacNeal-Schwendler Corporation (MSC) was one of the principal and original developers of the publicly available NASTRAN code. NASTRAN source code is integrated in a number of different software packages, which are distributed by a range of companies. The 1964 annual review of NASA's structural dynamics research program revealed that the research centers were separately developing structural analysis software that was specific to their own needs. The review recommended that a single generic software program should be used instead. In response, an ad hoc committee was formed. The committee determined that no existing software could meet their requirements. They suggested establishing a cooperative project to develop this software and created a specification that outlined the capabilities for the software. A contract was awarded to Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) to develop the software. The first name used for the program during its development in the 1960s was GPSA, an acronym for General Purpose Structural Analysis. The eventual formal name approved by NASA for the program, NASTRAN, is an acronym formed from NASA STRucture ANalysis. The NASTRAN system was released to NASA in 1968. In the late 1960s, the MacNeal-Schwendler Corporation (MSC) started to market and support its own version of NASTRAN, called MSC/NASTRAN (which eventually became MSC.Nastran). The original software architecture was developed by Joe Mule (NASA) and Gerald Sandler (NASA), and Stephen Burns (University of Rochester). NASTRAN software application was written to help design more efficient space vehicles such as the Space Shuttle. NASTRAN was released to the public in 1971 by NASA's Office of Technology Utilization. The commercial use of NASTRAN has helped to analyze the behavior of elastic structures of any size, shape, or purpose.