Fifty years ago today, NASA activated a lunar launch center on North Merritt Island, setting the stage for some of the greatest adventures in history.
Created to meet an extraordinary Cold War challenge, what we now call Kennedy Space Center began rising from mosquito-infested marshland in east-central Florida.
The Space Coast was born.
What follows is a tale-filled timeline of a half-century of triumph and tragedy at America’s storied gateway to space, as well as a glimpse into what the future holds.
Sept. 1, 1961
Jack King put out the news on Sept. 1, 1961: NASA and the Army Corp. of Engineers would begin negotiations with land owners on North Merritt Island to acquire 80,000 acres for “a large space vehicle launch facility.”
Three months after President John F. Kennedy’s call to send American astronauts to the moon, NASA wanted to expand its presence at Cape Canaveral and build a spaceport for manned lunar launches.
Hundreds of people in small communities like Neptune Beach, Allenhurst, Clifton and Shiloh would be displaced, and NASA was “determined that all owners receive just compensation,” King wrote in a news release.
“Most of Merritt Island was orange groves, and there were a few small communities like Courtenay and several other places,” said King, now 81 and a Cocoa Beach resident.
“But the big concern of NASA was that in acquiring all this land, we have it come out that we gave a fair shake to all the landowners. And that really did come through. I don’t recall that we had any great protests, you know, as far as the arrangements of taking over the location.”
What followed was a four-year, $800 million project that the industry trade magazine Architectural Forum called “one of the most awesome construction jobs ever attempted by Earth-bound men.”
Launch Complex 39 at KSC required a hangar big enough to assemble Saturn V moon rockets that stood 363 feet tall and 33 feet wide. At 525 feet tall, the Vehicle Assembly Building covers 8 acres and is one of the largest buildings by volume in the world.
Launch gantries standing 45 stories tall would top mobile launch platforms. Giant tracked crawler transporters would be needed to haul the mammoth rockets to the launch pad. To support the 12 million-pound load, NASA would have to build a 100-foot-wide “crawlerway” comprising a 7-foot-deep bed of stones topped by a layer of asphalt and a surface made of Alabama river rocks.
“It was just amazing coming out here over those next several years — just seeing everything from the start,” Jack King said. “My goodness, when we were building the crawlerway, it looked like we were building the Panama Canal.”
July 1, 1962
NASA officially activated its Launch Operations Center, now known as KSC, granting the embryonic lunar launch site equal status with other agency field centers. Previously, it had been the Launch Operations Directorate of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
First center director: Kurt Debus, a German rocket scientist and launch operations leader for Wernher von Braun.
Construction of the Vehicle Assembly Building begins.
In total, workers use 98,590 tons of steel, 65,000 cubic yards of concrete and drive 4,225 steel pilings 160 feet into the limestone below to construct the 525-foot-tall building.
Construction ends in 1966.
Construction of the first stretch of the “crawlerway” between the Vehicle Assembly Building and launch pad 39A began. Two 40-foot-wide lanes separated by a 50-foot median ultimately became the Saturn V and Apollo spacecraft’s roadway to the moon.
6:31 p.m., Jan. 27, 1967
John Tribe was on console when a spark from a chafed wire beneath the seat of astronaut Gus Grissom ignited a fire that swept through the Apollo 204 spacecraft.
Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were strapped into their spacecraft high atop a Saturn 1B rocket at Cape Kennedy’s Launch Complex 34, going through a test of all vehicle systems and operational procedures. It was a practice countdown for the first piloted Apollo test flight.
“I was just sitting there writing a test preparation sheet for something I wanted to do the next day on the vehicle, and I’m listening on my headset, and I suddenly hear, ‘Fire!’ ” said Tribe, 76, of Merritt Island.
“ ‘Fire in the spacecraft!’ and then shortly thereafter, ‘We’ve got a bad fire! Get us out of here!’ and then, finally, ‘We’re burning up!’ And it was all over in like 15 or 16 seconds.”
Dead silence. NASA’s launch team was stunned.
“You know, everybody was so traumatized by it. It was so unexpected,” said Tribe, a propulsion systems.
The subsequent investigation found deadly fire spread rapidly in the sealed cabin, which was pressurized with a flame-feeding, 100-percent oxygen environment. There were flammable materials everywhere. No emergency fire or medical rescue squads were on hand during the test. And there was no way for the crew to rapidly escape the capsule.
“We were blind to the safety aspects. That obviously came out in the investigation,” Tribe said. “We knew we were going to have to make a lot of changes to keep this program going.”
Nov 9, 1967
It was the loudest launch of all time.
On Nov. 9, 1967, an unmanned Saturn V blasts off on the first test flight of the rocket that would launch moon-bound American astronauts.
It was the first launch from John F. Kennedy Space Center, so named by Executive Order 11129 on Nov. 29, 1963, just seven days after the assassination of America’s 35th president.
Standing 363 feet tall, 33 feet in diameter, and weighing 6.2 million pounds, the Saturn V was the tallest, heaviest and most powerful rocket ever flown.
Liftoff came at 7 a.m., producing an acoustical wave that assaulted blast-proof windows in the Launch Control Center, and media facilities across the street. Both are 3.5 miles from pad 39A.
In Firing Room 1, windows shook and rattled, plaster dust fell from the ceiling.
The rolling thunder slammed CBS News Anchor Walter Cronkite: “By God, our building’s shaking here. Our building’s shaking! Oh! It’s terrific! The building’s shaking! This big glass window is shaking! We’re holding it with our hands! Look at that rocket go!” he screamed. “Into the clouds at 3,000 feet. The roar is terrific! Look at it going. You can see it, you can see it.”
Engineers said the noise reached about 120 decibels at the press site — louder than a front row seat at a rock concert. The threshold for pain is 125 decibels.
NASA toned things down after that. Launch-pad engineers added a sound suppression system to dampen the acoustical wave. The system dumped thousands of gallons of water onto the pad to quell the thunder of a Saturn V launch. But subsequent Saturn V launches still impressed nonetheless.
Oct. 11, 1968
Twenty-two months after the Apollo 1 fire, NASA astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham blasted off on Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo test flight. It launched from Cape Kennedy, which would become Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Dec. 21, 1968
American astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders blast off from launch pad 39A on the Apollo 8 mission. It is the first manned launch of a Saturn V rocket (Apollo 7 was flown on a Saturn 1B from Cape Kennedy), the first manned launch from Kennedy Space Center and the first human expedition beyond Earth orbit.
The three astronauts became the first to see the entire planet Earth from outer space and the first to see the dark side of the moon. The crew orbited the moon 10 times. They also conducted a Christmas Eve broadcast during which they read the first 10 verses of the Book of Genesis. At the time, the broadcast was the most-watched TV program ever.
9:32 a.m., July 16, 1969
“Ten, nine, ignition sequence start,” NASA launch commentator Jack King said. Five powerful first stage engines on the Saturn V rocket roared to life.
NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins rocked on top of the 36-story rocket for 8.9 seconds as the engines built up 7.5 million pounds of thrust.
Five giant launch tower swing arms pulled back from the Saturn V, and then, “Liftoff! We have a liftoff. Thirty-two minutes past the hour,” the Boston native said. “Liftoff on Apollo 11.”
He peered out thick glass windows toward the Atlantic Ocean.
“I looked out on the pad, and there is this magnificent rocket that’s sitting there in a bed of flames. I’ve already said, ‘liftoff,’ and it looked like it was just sitting there, you know. It just took an eternity for it to take off,” King said.
“It took 7 seconds for the Saturn V just to clear the tower. But once it started going, it really went.”
Dec. 7, 1972
An estimated 500,000 people flocked to Florida’s Space Coast to witness the only night launch of a Saturn V rocket, a midnight-hour spectacular that propelled Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harrison Schmitt on the 11th and final Apollo mission, which today remains the most recent human expedition beyond Earth orbit.
May 14, 1973
America’s first space station, Skylab, launched atop a Saturn V rocket. NASA had hoped to keep Skylab in orbit until a space shuttle could travel to it. However, higher-than-expected solar activity dragged the station toward the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Skylab made an uncontrolled reentry over the Indian Ocean on July 11, 1979, showering debris along a path that stretched to a sparsely populated region of western Australia. No injuries or property damage was reported.
Unbeknownst to many: the United States almost lost three astronauts on the last flight of an Apollo spacecraft, during atmospheric reentry over the Pacific Ocean.
“There was a phase of the reentry where they damn near killed themselves,” said John Tribe, 76, a propulsion system engineer and manager with Apollo spacecraft manufacturer North American Rockwell.
Fast and furious, plunging toward Earth, the forces of gravity building up, a fireball enveloped the craft as Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand and Deke Slayton journeyed home from a successful high-profile orbital hook-up with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft.
They launched at 3:50 p.m. July 15 from KSC, seven hours after Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov blasted off at Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. The two craft linked up two days later in a show of orbital détente. The ships parted ways July 19. The Soyuz returned to Earth July 21. Now Stafford, Brand and Slayton faced an emergency.
The crew missed two critical switch throws required to activate the Earth Landing System. A parachute door didn’t open. Drogue chutes didn’t deploy. Quick switch throws followed, but toxic rocket propellant dumped as scheduled from the steering system. A cabin relief valve opened automatically. Nitrogen textroxide started flowing into the cabin.
“All three astronauts got very sick. Brand passed out. The other two, their eyes were streaming, their faces were burning,” said Tribe, of Merritt Island.
The astronauts coughed. Slayton was nauseous.
They splashed down, the spacecraft upside down. All three hung from their straps. Stafford got loose, crawled to retrieve oxygen masks and revived Brand.
U.S. Navy divers from a rescue helicopter righted the spacecraft and a crane hoisted it onto the deck of the U.S.S. New Orleans.
Still sick, the crew fielded a congratulatory call from President Gerald Ford. Clearly suffering, their welcome ceremony was cut short. They went to sick bay, then were whisked to Tripler Hospital in Honolulu, where they stayed for two weeks.
“If it had gone on much longer,” Tribe said, his voice trailing off as the obvious became apparent.
The work force at Kennedy Space Center peaked at 26,500 in 1968. But a significant drawdown followed. By July 1970, a year after the historic Apollo 11 moon-landing mission, the work force had been cut to 15,000. By 1975, the center’s population dropped to 8,000.
The unemployment rate in Brevard County soared. Rocket scientists pumped gas for a living. Families left the area. People tell stories of some leaving their keys at their front door on the way out of town.
The shuttle program created its own boom and bust. In 1981, the KSC work force numbered 12,000. By the late 1980s, it rose to about 17,000. That number dropped to about 14,500 in 2005. And it is back to about 8,000 now.
April 12, 1981
Ask Norm Carlson, and he’ll tell you it was NASA’s boldest launch.
On the morning of April 12, 1981, astronauts John Young and Bob Crippen strapped into Columbia for NASA’s first shuttle flight. The new reusable spacecraft would be the first to blast off like a rocket, and land like an airplane.
An unbelievably complex flying machine, the shuttle would be propelled by two towering strap-on boosters, each packed with 1.1 million pounds of solid-fuel propellant, and three liquid-fueled orbiter main engines fed by a huge, bullet-shaped external tank filled with more than 500,000 gallons of propellant.
And unlike Apollo Saturn rockets, the shuttle had never been launched on an unmanned flight test. Saturn rockets had flown 16 times before the first manned mission, Apollo 7.
“We had almost a fully developed (Saturn) launch vehicle before we put a man on it. So I felt like we were in good shape as far as being safe,” said Carlson, 78, of Titusville, who served as the NASA Test Conductor for the first shuttle mission. “But that first shuttle, I had to hold my breath.”
1981 to 1986
NASA’s first 24 shuttle missions were some of the sportiest ever. Astronauts donned Buck Rogers-style jetpacks and flew away from the shuttle, without safety tethers. They retrieved stranded satellites, repaired solar explorers, deployed top-secret military spacecraft and commercial communications satellites.
Jan. 28, 1986
Seven astronauts were lost after Challenger broke up 73.6 seconds into flight. The crew included commander Francis “Dick” Scobee, pilot Michael Smith, mission specialists Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, and Judith Resnik, and two payload specialists: Gregory Jarvis and Teacher-In-Space Christa McAuliffe.
The accident was caused by the failure of an O-ring seal between two lower segments of Challenger’s right solid rocket boosters. Hot gases escaped the booster and burned through the bottom of Challenger’s external tank, triggering the break-up of the vehicle.
The accident grounded the shuttle fleet for 32 months.
Oct. 1, 1986
Forrest McCartney didn’t quite know what to expect when he drove through the gates of Kennedy Space Center, headed for the corner office on the fourth floor of the NASA Headquarters building – the domain of the center director.
A three-star general, McCartney was entering civilian grounds after 33-and-a-half years in the U.S. Air Force. His assignment: lead a demoralized KSC work force through a painful recovery from the Jan. 28 Challenger disaster.
“That had been a long time between the accident and October, and the work force had been laid off – a lot of layoffs – so the work force was very discouraged,” said McCartney, 81, of Indian Harbor Beach. “And so it was, I’ll say, not a very happy bunch of campers. The return-to-flight efforts were very slow, and the work force was in need of picking up. It was not a very good situation at all.”
But what McCartney also found was a work force that was very professional, dedicated, and loyal.
“The country wanted to get back flying, and we wanted to get back flying, and so we started hiring, and getting the people back doing what they do best. And there’s no better in the world at what they do – processing spaceflight hardware,” McCartney said.
Discovery and five astronauts blasted off Sept. 29, 1988, and NASA’s shuttle fleet was back in business.
1989 to 1992
NASA launched a flurry of major space science and planetary exploration missions when the shuttle fleet returned to flight. Astronauts also blasted off on seven military shuttle missions, the majority of which were classified top secret.
February 1994 to June 1998
Shuttle Atlantis blasted off June 27, 1995, headed toward the first shuttle docking with the Russian space station Mir. In a warmup for the joint U.S.-Russian assembly of the International Space Station, 10 shuttle missions were launched to Mir. The first was a rendezvous mission; the following nine docked. Seven U.S. astronauts spent a cumulative total of 977 days on Mir.
Oct. 29, 1998
“Booster ignition and liftoff of Discovery with a crew of six astronaut heroes and one American legend.”
And with that, NASA launch commentator Lisa Malone and the Kennedy Space Center shuttle launch team sent John Herschel Glenn Jr., into space 36 years after the Project Mercury astronaut became the first American to orbit Earth. At age 77, the retiring U.S. Senator from Ohio became the oldest person to fly in space.
Feb. 1, 2003
Columbia and seven astronauts were 16 minutes from a landing at Kennedy Space Center but the spacecraft never made it home. A 1.67-pound chuck of foam punched a pizza-sized hole in its wing 81 seconds after a Jan. 16 launch on a 16-day science mission.
The damage went undetected. Hot gasses blowtorched through the wing during atmospheric reentry, and the ship disintegrated over east Texas.
All onboard were killed: mission commander Rick Husband, pilot Willie McCool, payload commander Michael Anderson, mission specialists Kalpana Chawla, David Brown and Laurel Clark, amd payload specialist Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli to fly in space.
The accident grounded the shuttle fleet for two-and-a-half years.
Feb. 19, 2004
Discovery Vehicle Manager Stephanie Stilson fielded the call at home. At first she was shocked. Then she got excited. Atlantis had been slated to fly NASA’s first post-Columbia test flight. But the agency was making a change. Her baby, Discovery, would return the nation’s shuttle fleet to service.
“Right after the accident, we didn’t know what was going to happen. We didn’t know if we would ever fly again. And so, being chosen to be the team to put our country back into space was quite an honor,” said Stilson, 42, of Canaveral Groves.
In a way, it was fitting. Discovery was the nation’s shuttle fleet leader, and Discovery had been the orbiter that returned the nation to space after the 1986 Challenger accident.
“Everybody took it very seriously. We did not forget about the accident, did not forget about the losses we had, but we able to look at the positive,” said Stilson, who was the NASA manager in charge of Discovery’s ground processing for 11 missions over 11 years. “Okay, we’ve gone through this terrible tragedy. But now it’s time to pull our bootstraps up and get back into flying again.”
Discovery and a crew of seven blasted off on STS-114 on July 26, 2005. In a near repeat of the Columbia accident, a huge piece of external tank foam broke free and almost hit Discovery’s right wing.
Discovery landed safely on Aug. 9, 2005. External tank modifications kept the fleet grounded another year. And when it came time to fly again, ‘the workhorse’ of the fleet got the call again.
NASA set back into completing the task of finishing the International Space Station. The station now weighs almost one million pounds and spans an area larger than a U.S. football field. Its assembly is considered one of the greatest civil engineering achievements of all time.
May 11, 2009
Seven astronauts blast off from launch pad 39A on a fifth and final Hubble Space Telescope servicing flight, a high-profile mission to resuscitate the aging observatory. They succeeded.
July 21, 2011
Let the record show that Atlantis and NASA’s final four shuttle astronauts landed on Runway 15 at Kennedy Space Center at 5:57 a.m. EDT. Wheels Stop came 54 seconds later. “Mission complete, Houston,” said Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson. “After serving the world for over 30 years, the shuttle has earned its place in history, and it has come to a final stop.” NASA’s 135th and final shuttle mission was over.
Something was missing. Cruising into Kennedy Space Center in her 2002 Ford Thunderbird, Stephanie Stilson got “a very odd feeling.”
“I remember driving in that first day after being gone for over a month, and thinking, ‘Oh my goodness! Discovery is not sitting in an (Orbiter Processing Facility) bay anymore, where I can just walk over and see her whenever I like to,” she said.
Stilson, 42, had been Discovery’s Vehicle Manager and then Flow Director — the NASA manager in charge of that orbiter’s ground processing work — for more than a decade.
“And so I had that empty feeling of loss, or something being missing, from my daily routine. And, so that was a little emotional for me,” Stilson said. “I don’t get emotional very often, but that was a tough, a tough couple of hours getting dto that.”
Of course, Stilson was well aware of Discovery’s whereabouts. She is heading up NASA’s shuttle “transition and retirement” program. She is in charge of getting the vehicles ready for museum display, transporting them to their retirement homes, making certain they are well ensconced.
Discovery is wowing the public at the Smithsonian’s Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center outside Washington. The prototype Enterprise was recently delivered to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. Endeavour and Atlantis are still at KSC.
This fall, though, Endeavour will depart for the California Science Center in Los Angeles. Atlantis will stay home. It will be moved late this year to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.
Shawn Quinn is eyeing the future, and he sees big things for NASA at Kennedy Space Center. Really, really big things.
In fact, the Titusville resident sees a huge rocket, one standing more than 360 feet tall.