The Space Coast Gateway, Titusville and the Edge of Everything

An hour east of Orlando, the landscape changes. The interstate follows the St. Johns River basin through a corridor of pine flatwoods and cabbage palm, and then abruptly you are at the edge of the Indian River Lagoon, the long thin body of water between the Florida mainland and the barrier island that holds Cape Canaveral.

The town of Titusville sits on the western bank, looking east across the water toward the launch pads, which on a clear day are visible from the waterfront park as white towers and steel gantries and, if you are there at the right moment, a column of fire rising straight up and then tilting, following the curvature of the earth. The Kennedy Space Center occupies the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, a fact that says something useful about Florida: the rocket launches happen inside one of the most important migratory bird corridors on the Atlantic flyway. Manatees winter in the warm water outflows near the launch facilities.

Bald eagles nest in the scrub oaks three miles from the Vehicle Assembly Building. Titusville was a citrus and fishing town before the space program, its fortunes tied to the Indian River orange trade. When the NASA contracts arrived in the early nineteen sixties, the population grew nearly fivefold in a decade.

When the Apollo program wound down and shuttle launches became periodic rather than constant, the town contracted again. It has lived ever since in the economic orbit of a program it does not control, watching the sky to the east for the signs that tell it whether things are going well or not. The view from the Titusville riverfront on a launch morning, with the dawn light on the water and the gantries catching the first sun, is one of the better things Florida does quietly and without fanfare: the world's most powerful machines aimed at the stars, visible to anyone who shows up.