America's moon launch site was carved out of Florida citrus groves
To launch a 363-foot Saturn V, NASA needed far more room than Cape Canaveral offered. So from 1962 it bought up farmland on Merritt Island, much of it orange groves, letting growers lease back their trees for one last harvest. The result became Kennedy Space Center, NASA's main launch site since 1968.
Military rockets had been flying from the Cape since 1949. In December 1959 the Department of Defense handed NASA 5,000 staff and its Missile Firing Laboratory, which became the Launch Operations Directorate under the Marshall Space Flight Center. President Kennedy's 1961 pledge of a crewed lunar landing by 1970 changed the scale of everything, and on July 1, 1962 the directorate was spun off as the independent Launch Operations Center.
The Saturn V drove the geography. It would be stacked upright inside an enormous hangar and rolled out on a mobile platform to one of several pads, a layout the existing Cape could not accommodate. NASA eventually bought title to 131 square miles and negotiated another 87 with the state of Florida, with the Army Corps of Engineers handling purchases and turning to condemnation when talks stalled. Citrus groves on Merritt Island were bought by mid-1963, yet farmers could keep picking fruit until summer 1964, and even grove workers were issued security badges.
Architect Charles Luckman designed the main industrial buildings, and construction started in November 1962. Kennedy toured the site twice that year and again a week before his assassination on November 22, 1963. Just seven days later Lyndon Johnson's Executive Order 11129 renamed the complex after him. The order lumped the civilian centre together with the military station, so NASA's James Webb clarified that the Kennedy name covered only NASA's site, while the Air Force called its base Cape Kennedy Air Force Station.
Today the centre stretches about 34 miles along the coast, midway between Miami and Jacksonville, with around 700 buildings. Its 525-foot Vehicle Assembly Building stacks the biggest rockets, and a 3-mile runway once received returning shuttles. Apollo, Skylab, the Space Shuttle and Artemis all launched from its Launch Complex 39, and since 2010 it has courted commercial partners, adding pad LC-39C in 2015.
Source: Kennedy Space Center
