Back when afternoon thunderstorms kept scuttling Discovery’s lift-off, there was some discussion here of the rationale for selecting a Florida site for the purposes of launching space vehicles. It is, after all, extremely vulnerable to hurricanes, and rain is often present during the steamy summer months.
To that end, a colleague of mine from the New York Times, John Schwartz, has penned a fine piece today explaining why, among other things, the Cape got launches and Houston got flight control.
Here’s one snippet:
Florida offers advantages for launching missiles and spaceships, which is why the Air Force already had a missile range at Cape Canaveral when NASA came along. Firing off the eastern coast of Florida means that rockets can be launched over water — and if something goes wrong, there are no people below to be hurt.
Of course, rockets can be fired west across the ocean from sunny California as well — but Florida has physics on its side. Shooting to the east follows the rotation of Earth, and launching relatively close to the Equator gives a speed boost to orbit, a kind of running start derived from the greater circumference of the globe toward its midpoint.
Even in 1865, the novelist Jules Verne saw the benefits of launching from Florida, and in “From the Earth to the Moon,” he put the massive gun for his fictional spaceshot there. Verne envisioned a competition for space activities between Tampa, Fla., and Galveston Bay in Texas.
Jules Verne! Nice reference to the great sci-fi pioneer, John. I also liked John’s account of Houston wresting mission control from Virginia:
“The reason we came here was because Albert Thomas was head of the Appropriations Committee,” Dr. Kraft said.
Many of the engineers in Virginia wanted to stay there, he recalled, but the program director, Robert R. Gilruth, who would become head of the Houston center, said about their senior senator, Harry Flood Byrd, a conservative Democrat, “What has Mr. Byrd ever done for the space program?”
Dr. Kraft said he and the other engineers soon came to love the Houston area, adding, “The people went out of their way to make sure we were happy here.”
By the way, Discovery’s mission continues to proceed smoothly, with astronauts enjoying a little well-deserved recreation time today. Updates on the mission will remain light until early Monday, when the craft is due to return home.