Comeback combines launches, jobs

the fact that our nation was going into a recession, we had lost our bread and butter. We had lost our economy,” said Daniel Diesel, mayor of Titusville, which sits across the Indian River from the Kennedy Space Center.

Nowadays, the county’s unemployment rate is under 3 percent, and the Space Coast is humming with jobs and space launches. NASA’S first launch of its new moon rocket set for Saturday was expecting to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors like Ed Mayall. He traveled more than 4,300 miles from London to witness the first, scrubbed launch attempt on Monday.

“It’s just so exciting, the thought of being able to go to space, myself, potentially with all the commercial programs going on, it just makes you want to live it,” Mayall said.

While most of the past six decades of space business in Florida was orchestrated by NASA and the Air Force, this recent rejuvenation on the Space Coast has been powered in the past decade by private, commercial companies such as Space X and Blue Origin, founded by two of the planet’s richest men, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Perhaps nothing best captured the Space Coast’s comeback than Space X’s first astronaut lift-off in spring 2020, which put Florida’s central coast back in the business of catapulting humans into space and marked the first time a private company had launched people into orbit.

As of last year, the Kennedy Space Center had more than 12,300 civil servants, private contractors and other employees working at the spaceport, just a few thousand employees short of the 15,000 workers during the heydays of the shuttle