Orlando Sentinel 150: How Central Florida became ‘The gateway to the moon’

The history of space in Central Florida is one of shock and glory.

“3 Astronauts Killed”, “What Went Wrong?” and “Fatal Return.”

Those were the words plastered atop the Orlando Sentinel in 1968 for the deaths of the Apollo 1 astronauts, in 1986 for the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger and in 2003 for the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia.

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They marked the lowest of low points of the U.S. space endeavors.

But for all that pain, there was pride to be had on days that marked major changes in the country’s history, all launched from the Space Coast.

“SHEP DID IT!”, “Glenn Orbits In Shot Heard Around The World” and “Americans On The Moon.”

These were the heralds of the U.S. feats of sending the first American into space in 1961, the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962, and the first men to set foot on the lunar surface with Apollo 11 in 1969.

For every time tragedy struck, NASA picked itself up and made a return.

“7 Come 11 – It’s A Natural For Apollo”, “U.S. Back in Space” and “‘Good Luck, Godspeed’”

Space exploration’s story from Florida has been a roller coaster — but it would never have begun if not for the dominoes of the post-World War II world falling in place.

How It Began

In 1948, Naval Air Station Banana River was transferred to the Air Force and soon renamed Patrick Air Force Base. A year later, President Harry S. Truman designated Cape Canaveral as the place where the country would do its missile testing.

“The Cape, a desolate sandy, scrub area mapped by the Spaniards, was a wasteland inhabited by alligators, snakes and insects,” the Sentinel wrote. “It was important to no one. Perhaps that is why it was chosen for a launching site. Nothing could be hurt.”

Sabra Gossett, a curator for the Cape Canaveral Space Force Museum, said the choice to shift to Florida for missile launches came after issues with one launch out of New Mexico.

“They had an accident where they launched into Mexican airspace, and Mexico wasn’t very keen on that,” she said. “So they were like, ‘OK, where where else are we going to go?’”

The choice of Cape Canaveral may have centered on its remoteness, but the selling point was what Florida offered in terms of utility.

“It’s a prominent landmass. It kind of juts out,” Gossett said. “It’s not very populated, so you didn’t really have to worry about booms and all the fun stuff that we worry about now. And because it’s so close to the equator, it actually gave you a boost when you launched.”

What ensued was the creation of the Joint Long Range Proving Ground, bringing on an influx of military and civilian personnel, the construction of missile launch pads and a booming decade the Sentinel editorial board in 1960 called “the single biggest boost to our economy in Central Florida’s history.”

It all started with the spoils of war, with the U.S. having procured 100 Nazi Germany V-2 rockets developed by Wernher von Braun, who became the U.S. maestro of post-war rocket development and a mainstay at Cape Canaveral.

Called the Bumper project, two of the V-2s made their way to the Cape. The first rocket launch from the Cape was Bumper No. 8 on July 24, 1950 with a second coming a few days later.

The 200-mile flight over the Atlantic was as if a magic wand had been waved over the land it left behind, the Sentinel wrote.

In a special 10-year anniversary of that first launch, the Sentinel opined, “When it rose into the summer sun from a tangled spiderweb of pipe and scaffolding on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, few of us Florida natives could foresee what the result would be.”

The ’50s saw a major expansion as launch pads flourished along what was called Missile Row, allowing for more powerful rockets like Redstone, Atlas and Saturn to fly.

“It very quickly escalated, probably within five years, because you have the first launch in ’50, and then by ’58 you have our first successful satellite,” Gossett said.

Gossett was touring Launch Complex 26, where Explorer I lifted off Feb. 1, 1958 atop a Juno 2 rocket. It was America’s answer to Sputnik 1 and 2, satellites that launched the previous year by the Soviet Union and caused national anxiety.

“Von Braun was like, ‘Hey, I have this ready if you guys will give me permission,’” she said about the satellite, developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Ours did more than beep, [it] actually had sensors and stuff that could do things, and it detected the Van Allen radiation belt. So it was better.”

Central Florida grows

The progress at the Cape had the region catching moon fever.

“Bumper 8 and its followers established Cape Canaveral not only as The Gateway To The Moon – a slogan The Sentinel copyrighted several years ago – but as the gateway to prosperity in Central Florida,” the editorial board wrote in a special 10-year anniversary edition of the launch in 1960.

An economic study done in those first 10 years cited the tremendous influx of people seeking space-related work.

The boom “is responsible for many things: For the gigantic Martin Co. in Orlando, which employs 8,000; for the scores of allied electronics manufacturing and testing firms which have sprung up all over Central Florida; for astounding population growth in Brevard and neighboring counties,” the Sentinel reported.

Brevard County had a population of 23,653 in 1950, which topped 111,000 by 1960 and was forecast to grow to 150,000 by 1964. The Orlando area’s population nearly doubled over that period ending 1960 with about 920,000.

Orlando’s Martin Co. became Martin Marietta, which was then bought by Lockheed Corp. to become Lockheed Martin in 1995. Its facility on Sand Lake Road opened in 1957 for missile production, including Pershing and Patriot missiles.

The site also assembled the first monorails for Walt Disney World, but the influx of tourism in the 1970s eventually forced the site to shift away from missile manufacturing. It now focuses on military logistics equipment manufacturing.

Its Orlando location spans 2.7 million square feet with an additional 1 million square feet on the Space Coast, including assembly of the Orion spacecraft used in NASA’s Artemis program. The company estimates its Florida operations across 73 facilities support 17,000 jobs, including 11,000 in the Orlando area.

“Lockheed Martin is expected to drive more than $70 billion in economic value to Florida’s economy over the next 10 years, paving the way for the community to become the innovation hub it is today,” a spokesperson said about its footprint on the region.

Other big-name companies in the region in the 1950s included Boeing, Northrop Corp., General Electric, Douglas Aircraft, Convair and RCA, which were among 30 civilian contractors active on the missile site.

The influx of companies in need of a technically capable workforce would eventually provide the impetus for “Space U,” a nickname for Florida Technical University which was created in 1963 and opened in 1968. FTU was the predecessor to the University of Central Florida, which is among the largest schools in the U.S. for engineers today.

Meanwhile, the missile business never stopped.

“It’s always been a linchpin,” Gossett said. “The military has always been the push.”

And as the 1950s closed, the era of human spaceflight was beginning.

From Mercury to Apollo

President Dwight D. Eisenhower created NASA with the National Aeronautics and Space Act on July 29, 1958, and less than a year later the original Mercury Seven astronauts were unveiled.

President John F. Kennedy was in office by the time Alan Shepard became the first American in space, launching in a Mercury capsule atop a Redstone rocket on the Freedom 7 mission on May 7, 1961 from Canaveral’s Launch Complex 5.

“How long is time? How vast is space?” posited reporter Dave Howell in his coverage for the Orlando Evening Star. Time and space were “the same size for 15 minutes this morning. And history was there to measure it.”

“300 top-ranking newsmen clustered tensely in the open press stands at Cape Canaveral this morning,” Howell wrote. “They watched the metamorphosis of a hero. His cocoon, a Mercury Redstone rocket. He entered it a 5:30 a.m., an American idol. He emerged at 9:49 a Free World hero.”

Shepard’s successful flight was only a suborbital trip, however. It came less than a month after the Soviet Union made its own history launching Yuri Gagarin as the first human into space on the Vostok 1 mission, which completed a full orbit of the Earth.

Shepard’s flight also actually came after the U.S. put a chimpanzee named Ham on a short flight in January 1961.

“Before manned flight, you had bioflight,” Gossett said, pointing at a wall of pictures showing eight monkeys who ventured into space. “Our lovely primates that we love to talk about.”

A chimp named Enos flew on an Atlas rocket to orbit, setting up America’s next big feat on Feb. 20, 1962. That’s when John Glenn flew his historic Friendship 7 mission, which launched atop the more powerful Atlas rocket from Canaveral’s Launch Complex 14.

With a front page featuring a fist-raising Glenn caricature and illustration of his launch and landing — and the Sentinel’s copyrighted “Cape Canaveral Gateway To The Moon” logo — the next morning’s paper sported the headline, “‘America Is Coming,’ New Paul Revere Cries With Three Rides Around Earth.”

Following JFK’s challenge to NASA of “achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon,” the momentum surged in Central Florida.

Mercury grew into the Gemini program, including the arrival of Orlando’s John Young to the astronaut corps.

Young, who attended Princeton Elementary in College Park and was a graduate of Orlando High School’s Class of 1948, would fly on two Gemini missions and Apollo 10 and later command Apollo 16 and walk on the moon. He also commanded the first Space Shuttle flight. John Young Parkway is named in his honor.

Gemini would shift to Apollo — and then tragedy struck NASA and the world halted.

Apollo 1 fire

The three crewmembers for the first Apollo human spaceflight — Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Roger Chafee and Ed White — died during a test of their spacecraft at Launch Complex 34 on Jan. 27, 1967.

“The last breath of the astronauts probably was a sheet of flame,” reads coverage in the Orlando Evening Star. “All in an instant it seared their lungs, burned their silver space suits and gutted the capsule that was built to be their piece of earth in the void of space.”

Rescue efforts left dozens more injured, mostly from smoke inhalation, and the Sentinel’s coverage of concerned family members illustrated the terror some felt that their loved ones also may have perished.

Staff writer Jeanne Gold interviewed wives of IBM workers employed at what was then named Cape Kennedy.

“I was watching TV with our eight children when the bulletin came,” said Mrs. Thomas Cimafranca. “I just couldn’t move. One of the children began crying and another started to scream, “That’s where Daddy works. Is Daddy dead? Is Daddy dead? and at that moment the phone range with my husband telling us he was safe.”

‘One Small Step For Man …’

The tragedy, though, was not enough to stop America’s surge to the moon. Apollo 7 launched Oct. 11, 1968, from the same pad where the Apollo 1 crew perished.

Three more crewed missions – Apollo 8, which flew around the moon; Apollo 9, which tested out lunar module docking close to Earth; and Apollo 10, a dry-run back to the moon that did everything but land – flew in quick succession, setting up the July 16, 1969 launch of Apollo 11.

Sentinel staff writer Skip Johnson was working overnight as Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin descended to the moon’s surface, touching down on Sunday, July 20, 1969, and taking the historic first steps before midnight.

“Neil Armstrong walked on its cracky, desolate surface for two hours and 13 minutes, shattering forever the bonds which have held man to his own soil since time began,” Johnson wrote in the paper’s final edition. “Armstrong, the commander of Apollo 11, crept out of the grotesque lunar module — nicknamed Eagle — about 10:40 p.m. and slowly began descending the nine steps along its spindly front leg. And, as people throughout the world watched on television, he became history’s first person to place a human footprint on the moon.”

Interviews with those in Central Florida who watched the landing came under a headline, “Moon Landing Stirs ‘Christmas In July’ Mood.”

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“It was just like the spirit of Christmas time all over town,” Mrs. Rita Bauer of Winter Park said. “A quiet kindness and peaceful atmosphere prevailed throughout the day.”

Dose of reality

The moon landing missions continued, but only through Apollo 17, with the last footprints on the moon left there in December 1972.

Funding for Apollo was pulled during President Richard Nixon’s administration, and U.S. human spaceflight in the 1970s consisted of just three Skylab missions and a joint American-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz flight.

There would be almost another six years before the first flight of the Space Shuttle Program.

It was the Space Coast’s first taste of an economic slowdown.

Mike Haridopolos, now a U.S. congressman, was a history teacher in Brevard County in the early 1990s.

“What we saw after the Apollo program was very traumatic for our community,” he said. “History tells us that, of course, Brevard took a big hit.”

An estimated 700,000 people were on hand for the Apollo-Soyuz launch on July 15, 1975, the last of 33 Saturn rockets used across the Apollo and Skylab launches. The Sentinel’s front page the next day featured an article by retired NASA chief of public affairs Gordon Harris with the headline “Suddenly, Launch Team – ‘Fired’”

“After the cheers and applause acknowledging a successful liftoff, the men shook hands with their colleagues as they walked out, headsets in hand, knowing this was the last for them, also,” it read. “Today, the separation notices begin and in 30 days most of the 1,800-member team that made lunar landings, 100-ton space stations and a union of American and Russian pilots seem almost routine would be looking for new jobs.”

The Shuttle

“After [years] of waiting, the interminable countdown was over,” Sentinel Star reporter reporter Peter Larson wrote on April 12, 1981. “America’s stumbling space program, after a six-year intermission, seemed as sure-footed as ever.”

Space Shuttle Columbia’s launch that day was the first of 135 shuttle missions that spanned more than 30 years.

Commander John Young made his fifth and final trip to space at age 50, with a heartbeat of 75 to 80 beats a minute, while first-time flier Bob Crippen, 43, had a heartbeat pulsed at 130 beats per minute.

“That was one fantastic ride. I highly recommend it,” Crippen said as he entered space for the first time. “Oh, man, that is so pretty.”

“It sure hasn’t changed any,” Young said during his first spaceflight in nine years. “It’s something else out there. … It was worth the wait.”

Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour were the workhorses that put the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit and built the International Space Station.

The NASA workforce expanded once again growing to more than 20,000 among government and contract employees.

Central Florida’s space business was back on track.

“With the shuttle coming on board, we saw that uptick once again,” Haridopolos said. “The jobs that were created [were] not just at Kennedy Space Center, but all the ancillary jobs that came with it.”

Tragedy twice, 14 lives lost

On the cold Tuesday morning of Jan. 28, 1986 – 19 years and one day since the Apollo 1 fire – another tragedy took place during the shuttle’s 25th mission.

Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, killing its seven crew members: commander Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, pilot Michael J. Smith, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnick and civilian teacher Christa McAuliffe.

The explosion was ultimately blamed on an O-ring that failed in one the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters, allowing a flame to pierce the external fuel tank. Hearings revealed engineers had raised concerns about the dangers of cold weather on the O-rings, but management ignored the warnings.

The space shuttle did not return to flight until Sept. 28, 1988, more than 2-1/2 years after Challenger’s tragic end, amid promises NASA would change its mentality to one of a culture of safety.

That lasted until Feb. 1, 2003, 17 years and four days since the horror of Challenger. This time, seven more lives were lost when the original shuttle orbiter Columbia broke up on reentry over the skies of Texas, flying its 28th and final mission.

Killed were the crew of STS-107: Rick Husband, Kalpana Chawla, William McCool, David Brown, Laurel Clark, Michael Anderson and Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon.

This time, it was insulation foam that broke off the fuel tank during launch that struck parts of the shuttle orbiter, damaging heat-shield tiles needed to keep it safe during re-entry into the atmosphere.

Once again NASA’s safety culture was questioned. Once again NASA promised to be better. Once again, the shuttle program was put on pause, this time for more than three years.

The culture of safety held strong through the end of the shuttle program. The final flight, STS-135, launched on July 8, 2011, with Space Shuttle Atlantic closing out an era when it landed at Kennedy Space Center on July 21.

The Sentinel’s chronicler

Sentinel photographer Red Huber, a major chronicler of the history of spaceflight, shot nearly every shuttle mission during his career.

He was there for the beginning and the end, shooting the Challenger disaster the the Columbia investigation.

“We’re human first before we’re photojournalists,” he said. “So you think of those things, but you know the photograph [is] your job. You do the best you can just to tell that story, to share that with people that can’t be there to witness it.”

Huber was there for the astronaut walkouts for the last flights of both Challenger and Columbia, remembering the smiles on the faces of people so excited for their trips into space.

“Those images are seared in my memory,” he said.

Since retired, he’s optimistic about the safety of astronauts for what’s ahead.

“You look back at those images, and you think that happened 40 years ago,” he said about the Challenger accident. “But then I think about how some things have changed in human spaceflight, the vehicles, the safety … everything is progressed to a higher level.”

Economic doldrums again

The post-shuttle days were eerily similar to the years after Apollo — exacerbated by the cancellation of the Constellation program, which would have used crewed capsules to return astronauts to space.

“They decided to eventually mothball the shuttle, and we were all in a conundrum because … we were also going through an economic downturn in 2008, ’09, and ’10, and it was a real struggle,” said Haridopolos, who had transitioned to politics in the Florida House and Senate.

Kennedy Space Center topped 15,000 employees in the mid 2000s, but that dropped to 8,500 a year after the final shuttle mission. And Brevard County’s unemployment rate spiked to nearly 12% by August 2011.

The need for a federal workforce at KSC dwindled, and that’s when state officials started looking to commercial companies to help fill in the blanks.

“We were thinking, how do we help rebuild the space industry? Because there’s so much talent here, and we decided that the best way to do it is to create these public-private partnerships,” he said.

That led to Space Florida lobbying aerospace giants to make Florida look more attractive, but also looking to keep some companies already in the state from moving elsewhere.

“Ultimately, we were able to capture Blue Origin and SpaceX. Not easy thing to do,” he said, noting he and then-Gov. Rick Scott “would actually get on the phone with CEOs so we wouldn’t see that total destruction of our economy with the loss of the shuttle.”

A delayed new era

It took nine years, but human spaceflight returned to the Space Coast in 2020 when Elon Musk’s SpaceX won the commercial crew race with its Crew Dragon spacecraft.

Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley became the first NASA astronauts to fly on a commercial spacecraft, launching on the Demo-2 mission atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

“The moment was like one large sigh of relief, for thousands of engineers who have dedicated nearly a decade to this program, for SpaceX founder Elon Musk who founded his company to take humans to space, for NASA which bet on a new commercial approach to human spaceflight and for the families of the two brave astronauts who the ride,” the Sentinel wrote the next day.

“With this launch, decades of lost years and little action are officially over,” said President Trump, who attended the launch with Musk. “A new age of American ambition has now begun.”

What’s next?

Florida has moved from being the place people bring their rockets to the place where they build them.

Already, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin employs more than 4,500 people across its sprawling New Glenn rocket manufacturing site in Merritt Island, and SpaceX is putting the final touches on its own rocket manufacturing site within Kennedy Space Center for its new Starship and Super Heavy rocket.

Blue Origin has already spent more than $3 billion on its Space Coast presence, including more than $1 billion at Canaveral’s Launch Complex 36, which is being rebuilt to support two New Glenn launch pads.

SpaceX’s Starship-related efforts, which also include the construction of three new launch towers at KSC and Cape Canaveral, are part of a $1.8 billion infrastructure investment by Musk’s company.

“I actually relate this to Detroit after World War II, where they became the automotive center of the world,” Haridopolos said. “We want to be the space center of the world.

Meanwhile, NASA continues to move through launches of its Space Launch System rocket, which was used to fly four astronauts on the Orion spacecraft for a historic flyby of the moon earlier this year.

NASA is targeting 2028 for Artemis IV, the first return of humans to the lunar surface since Apollo 17 left the moon in 1972.

Moonshots aside, the Space Coast set a record in 2025 with 109 orbital launches from all providers.

Forecasts project the rate will climb to more than 300 a year before the decade is out.

“I’ve seen the highs and lows, and now we are absolutely booming,” Haridopolos said. “Not only do we have the strong defense industry, we also have a booming space industry, and I think we’re just getting started.”

More stories and features from the Orlando Sentinel’s 150 years of covering Central Florida can be found at OrlandoSentinel.com/150. Sign up for our free history newsletter at OrlandoSentinel.com/newsletters

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