Nassau Bay: The Town NASA Built

Nassau Bay is one of the few American cities built specifically for a space program. When NASA chose Clear Lake as the site of its Manned Spacecraft Center in nineteen sixty-two, a developer converted the old Spirit of Seventeen Seventy-Six Ranch into a planned waterfront community for astronauts, engineers, and scientists. Construction began that same year on five hundred seventy acres of former ranchland.

By nineteen sixty-eight, nearly three thousand people lived here; by nineteen seventy-four, the population had reached six thousand two hundred. The city incorporated in nineteen seventy. For a decade, Nassau Bay was the closest thing America had to a company town for the cosmos, where the neighbors who asked you what you did for work might have walked on the moon.