Why mission control in houston

But when we arrived, we arrived to an area that was really not a commercial area. It had been a Girl Scout camp and it had been an area where people went for the summer. But this was now going to be the home of the space program.

And it was pretty amazing to me that this little highway that was called 'Farm-to-Market ' and later became NASA 1, could be the spot where this advanced technology would take place. But the moon landing President John Kennedy envisioned required a huge expansion that was not possible at Langley.

NASA managers realized they needed a new home for the escalating space effort, the facility that would become known as the Manned Spacecraft Center. Money and Politics Many employees and senior officials at NASA were happy with their headquarters in Virginia, but the Manned Spacecraft Center was going to spend a lot of federal dollars and there were politics to consider. Among the several sites that were suitable, Webb chose Mare Island, California. Johnson overruled Webb's decision and declared that the Manned Spacecraft Center would be situated in Houston, Texas, the sixth largest city in the U.

Johnson argued that Cape Canaveral was overcrowded with military rockets and declared that mission control should be sited at least miles from the launch site. Florida partisans countered with Tampa. Johnson came back with a determination that the control center should be miles from launch. But I doubt it would have made much of a difference The area considerations don't quite ring true to me, either speaking as someone who's been out to JSC a number of times. There's actually quite a bit of land at JSC which isn't developed not that it's not used, but there aren't any buildings there , and plenty more relatively open land around Houston if they really needed it.

EDIT: I mean, once it had been established, of course. Prior to it being established Some of the mythology surrounding the move to Houston is wonderful and hard to stamp out.

Nothing like that is true, of course. Among the criteria for the MSC site was proximity to a rail line and ocean going barge access. Albert Thomas, a congressman from Houston for almost 30 years, was extremely influential in this decision. He was a Rice graduate and was even involved in the Humble Oil land donation. And it didn't hurt matters that the speaker of the House at the time was Rep. Sam Rayburn of Texas. There really isn't any benefit to having mission control at the launch site.

No other spacecraft programs, scientific, commercial or military have their main control centers at the launch sites. Major spacecraft have some form of control center at the factory, comsat operators have it at their HQ, military at certain nodes, NASA scientific at design centers, etc. Having control near the design center is the greatest reason.

And there wasn't a "whole field center" at the Cape.