Major stories and events
NASA Manned Spacecraft Center
When Houston landed the Manned Spacecraft Center — later to be known as the Johnson Space Center — in 1961, the city was over the moon with the idea that anything was possible.
Of course, Houstonians already knew that. The city had harnessed the power of air conditioning to make the swampy area livable, dug the Houston Ship Channel to create one of the country’s largest ports, and was on its way to becoming the capital of the nation’s oil and gas industry.
There was something special about getting a space center, though. The Soviet Union shot a dog into space in 1957, and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth four months before Houston was even selected.
Then came the launch of two Americans into Earth’s orbit on Gemini V, three more sent to take a spin around the moon on Apollo 8, and another trio to walk on it via Apollo 11 six months later. Then, too, came engineering the rescue of Apollo 13 after Command Module Pilot John L. Swigert Jr. uttered the words that since have lived in infamy: “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”
By then, Houston already was known as “Space City.”
Today, the $1.5 billion complex on 1,620 acres in the Clear Lake area serves as mission control, astronaut training center, leads NASA’s International Space Station operations, among other projects, and is one of NASA’s largest research and development facilities.
Though NASA consists of 20 facilities across the country, the Johnson Space Center is the home of the nation’s manned space program, and for some, the heart of the agency.
“When NASA was first conceived, there were a lot of people who thought, ‘You’re going too far with this kind of stuff. It’s kind of wild.’ But it wasn’t wild at all. It was looking ahead, looking to the future,” said Henry Dethloff, a historian who has written extensively on the Johnson Space Center.
Houstonians were tickled to have the center here. Kids would run through the streets announcing to the world when an astronaut moved to their block, and businesses tripped over themselves to offer housing, office space, ballgame tickets and anything else the space center’s new arrivals could want, according to Dethloff. Parades and the president would welcome the center to town and people would feast on barbecue in its honor.
Since then, the space center has diversified and injected more than $100 billion into the local economy, according to NASA, along the way becoming an integral part of Houston’s identity, from the “Space City” patches sewn onto Houston Police Department uniforms to the name of the Houston Astros.
“There ain’t a damn thing wrong with doing something in this country today that makes the American people feel good, in my opinion,” said Milt Heflin, a retired former Apollo recovery team member, shuttle flight director and JSC associate director. Even today, he said, people are “absolutely overwhelmingly in love” with the space program and are giddy when they meet people who work at JSC.
Driven by Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, President John F. Kennedy declared in 1961 the U.S. would send a man to the moon within the decade. Within months, Houston was one of 20 cities in the running to house the manned spacecraft center.
The location had to be just right: transportation in ice-free water by barge, mild climate, allweather commercial jet service, a Department of Defense air base that could handle military aircraft, a nearby university and an affordable property.
A Clear Lake-area rice field, not far from Galveston Bay and close to Ellington Field fit the bill. Houston became the runner-up, but won the bid after first-choice Tampa Bay, Fla., was scratched when officials decided not to close down MacDill Air Force base, removing the site from consideration.
Skeptics thought the stars aligned too perfectly to locate the site in Houston. Not only was Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson — who was instrumental in passing the 1958 legislation creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as majority leader in the U.S. Senate — a Texan, but other officials in influential positions also hailed from the Lone Star state: U.S. House Speaker Sam Rayburn, House Appropriations Chairman Albert Thomas from the district neighboring Clear Lake, Rep. Bob Casey and Rep. Olin E. Teague on the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, with Teague heading the subcommittee on Manned Space Flight.
Politics played its part. Thomas had friends looking to develop the land in the Clear Lake area, at least one of whom met with NASA officials scouting sites before Kennedy had announced the Apollo program. Kennedy later would dangle the center before Thomas to entice him into supporting several key bills in Congress. Once Houston won the center, Thomas’ allies at Friendswood Development Corp. built residential and business developments outside the space center and his friends at Brown and Root, a large construction company, built many of the dozens of buildings on the property today.
Staff members moving to Houston were less than keen with the location. The city was hot and unforgiving to the first team visiting the site, welcoming it with heavy, humid air, land still soggy and ravaged by Hurricane Carla with boats stranded on the road that eventually would lead to the space center’s main entrance.
Within two years, some 750 employees had relocated to Houston, largely from Langley, Va., and Patrick Air Force Base near Cocoa Beach, Fla., and nearly another 700 were hired. At its height, the center was home to 17,000 employees during the space shuttle program, but now is down to 13,500.
“Nobody at the time ever expected NASA to be what NASA is today and to accomplish all the things they set out and accomplished. It was a dream. It was really fantasy,” said Bob Mitchell, who was 6 when the center was promised to Houston.
He now is president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership and heavily involved with advocating for the space center. Where Kennedy leaned into space exploration, presidents of late have scaled back, leaving Johnson Space Center to serve primarily as mission control.
NASA still is busy. After launching the Juno space probe five years ago, the unmanned spacecraft just entered into orbit around Jupiter where it will study the massive and mysterious gas planet. NASA also is developing tools to send humans to Mars even as the federal government has looked to the private space industry for future growth.
“A lot of people just take NASA for granted because they make the most difficult thing in the world look easy,” Mitchell said.
Space exploration sparked a sense of wonder and ambition that galvanized the country, Dethloff said. “I think the big thing about NASA is, it created an aura of excitement and aspiration and ‘we can do it’ (attitude) that just made the age, not just Texas but for the United States.”