Apollo Eleven Was Launched From Ais Territory

On July sixteenth, nineteen sixty-nine, a Saturn Five rocket lifted off from Launch Complex Thirty-Nine-A at Kennedy Space Center and began the journey that would land two human beings on the surface of the Moon four days later. The launch was witnessed by about a million people standing along Florida's Atlantic coast. It was broadcast live to an estimated six hundred million people around the world.

The land it launched from is called Merritt Island. Before the space program arrived, it was traditional territory of the Ais people, a coastal maritime nation who lived along the Indian River Lagoon and the barrier islands of the central Florida Atlantic coast for thousands of years. European contact was devastating to the Ais; by the early eighteenth century, the population had collapsed under the same combination of disease and colonial violence that destroyed the Timucua to the north. The Ais as a distinct nation ceased to exist before the United States was founded.

When the federal government began acquiring land for what would become Kennedy Space Center in the late nineteen fifties, Merritt Island was home to a farming and fishing community. The specifics of exactly who was displaced and in what numbers are not fully established in the publicly accessible record; the research base on this displacement is still developing. What is documented is that the community was largely Black, that the acquisition was by federal eminent domain, and that the displacement preceded the first American rocket launch from the island.

The space program was one of the greatest collective human achievements of the twentieth century. It was built on land that had been occupied, farmed, and fished by people who were there before the government decided it needed a launch site.

That is not a diminishment of what lifted off from here. It is a complete accounting of what was here first.