Cape Canaveral and the Space Age, Florida's Twentieth-Century Identity

On July twenty-fourth, nineteen fifty, a rocket called the Bumper Eight lifted off from a stretch of barrier island on Florida's Atlantic coast, forty-five miles east of Orlando. It was the first rocket launched from what would become Cape Canaveral, and it inaugurated a relationship between Florida and the American space program that would define the state's identity for the rest of the century. The site was chosen for reasons that remain compelling geography.

Cape Canaveral juts east into the Atlantic, meaning rockets can be launched over open ocean rather than populated land, and debris from any failure falls into the sea. Florida's southerly latitude, at twenty-eight and a half degrees north, gives rockets a boost from the Earth's rotation that northern launch sites cannot match. And the weather, problematic for hurricanes, is otherwise cooperative, more clear launch days per year than most of the American interior.

The Mercury program launched its first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, from Cape Canaveral on May fifth, nineteen sixty-one. John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth from here on February twentieth, nineteen sixty-two. The Apollo program's Saturn Five rockets, the most powerful machines ever flown, left their launch pads at Kennedy Space Center, the facility built adjacent to the Cape beginning in nineteen sixty-two, carrying twelve men to the lunar surface between nineteen sixty-nine and nineteen seventy-two.

The Space Shuttle, which flew from Kennedy Space Center from April twelfth, nineteen eighty-one until July eighth, twenty eleven, made launches from Florida a near-regular occurrence for thirty years, punctuated by the tragedies of Challenger in January nineteen eighty-six and Columbia in February two thousand three. After the Shuttle program ended, private launch companies began filling the manifest. SpaceX has made Kennedy Space Center and the adjacent Cape Canaveral Space Force Station some of the busiest launch facilities on Earth, with dozens of missions per year carrying commercial satellites and crew to the International Space Station.

Cape Canaveral is still Florida's eastern headland, still a barrier island of scrub oak and palmettos, still home to a wildlife refuge where manatees winter in the warm discharge canal water and loggerhead sea turtles nest on the same beaches where rocket exhaust drifts inland on launch nights.