Cape Canaveral: The Launch Coast

The launches are visible from Interstate Ninety-Five. On a clear night, a rocket launch from Kennedy Space Center can be seen from as far as a hundred miles away, a pillar of orange fire that rises too slowly to be a firework and too fast to be anything natural. The Cape has been launching rockets since nineteen fifty, selected because it sits on the eastern coast of the United States, which means rockets launched toward the east fly out over the Atlantic rather than over population centers, and the curvature of the earth adds a slight boost to eastward launches.

Kennedy Space Center was the departure point for every American lunar mission. Twelve people walked on the moon between nineteen sixty-nine and nineteen seventy-two. The pads they launched from are still there.

Pad Thirty-Nine-A, which launched Apollo Eleven, is now leased to SpaceX. The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex is about thirty miles east of the interstate on State Road Four-oh-five. Daytona Beach, north of the Cape, has been a speed venue since the early nineteen hundreds, when the hard-packed tidal sand of the beach was used as a natural straightaway.

The Daytona Beach races moved to the current Daytona International Speedway in nineteen fifty-nine. The speed record on the beach, set by Malcolm Campbell in nineteen thirty-five, was two hundred seventy-six miles per hour. The Timucua people had extensive settlements along this stretch of the Atlantic coast.

The largest settlement complex in the region, Saturiwa, was in what is now the Jacksonville area. The Timucua were gone as a people by the mid-eighteenth century.