Goldens on the Road: 🚀 NASA-The Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral

NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida has long served as America's spaceport, hosting all of the federal government's manned spaceflights since the late 1960s.

Kennedy Space Center is named after President John F. Kennedy, who famously declared in 1961 that the United States would put an astronaut on the moon,

and bring that person safely back to Earth, before the end of the decade.

At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, space shuttle Atlantis, below, is towed from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) before being put on display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

NASA became operational in October 1958. Just three years later, the space agency began gearing up to put a man on the moon, directed by the goals President Kennedy outlined in a speech to Congress on May 25, 1961.

Such an ambitious undertaking would require the biggest rocket ever built — the 363-foot-tall (111 meters) Saturn 5.

The mighty Saturn V,
the largest rocket ever flown, had five rocket engines on the first stage alone.

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins blasted off for the moon from KSC on July 16, 1969. Other moon walkers followed in their footsteps, until the last Apollo flight in December 1972.

The Lunar Lander, Command Module and Alan Shepherd's lunar suit.

Moon Rocks

Kennedy Space Center was pivotal to that bold effort, which ultimately succeeded when Neil Armstrong and his two Apollo 11 crew mates splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969. Apollo 11 launched from Kennedy Space Center, as did all subsequent flights in the Apollo program, and every one of the space shuttle's 135 missions.

Kennedy Space Center lift off of space shuttle flight.

The six Space Shuttles

Enterprise can be viewed at Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, New York City, NY

Sadly, Columbia was lost on it's return from the

mission.

Again, sadly, the Challenger was lost during lift off.

The Discovery is at the National Air and Space Museum, Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Chantilly Va.

Atlantis is displayed at NASA.

Endeavour is located at the California Science Center, Los Angeles, CA

Atlantis is beautifully displayed at NASA in Florida. Here are just a few pictures I took of the Atlantis Shuttle.

But the end of the shuttle program in July 2011 brought big changes to the Florida center, which has seen its workforce fall to 8,500 employees from 15,000 about 15 years earlier. Here are some basic facts about KSC, its storied past and where the center is headed in the future.

KSC spreads across 219 square miles (567 square kilometers) on Merritt Island, just northwest of Florida's Cape Canaveral.

The Cape has been a center of U.S. launch activity since 1949, when President Harry Truman established the Joint Long-Range Proving Ground — currently known as the Eastern Range — there to test missiles.

It was a nearly ideal location for this purpose — virtually uninhabited, with a climate permitting year-round activities. And vehicles could be launched out over the Atlantic Ocean, minimizing the chances of affecting populated areas.

The first launch from the Cape occurred in 1950, when a military-civilian team lofted a modified German V-2 rocket to an altitude of 10 miles (16 km). On Jan. 31, 1958, Explorer 1 blasted off from Cape Canaveral, becoming the United States' first satellite to reach orbit.

The facilities at Cape Canaveral couldn't support the enormous Saturn V vehicle, according to NASA records, so space agency officials began looking for another site.

They settled on nearby Merritt Island, and began acquiring land there in 1962. The new facility was originally called the Launch Operations Directorate (LOD), and it reported to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

In July 1962, the LOD was renamed the Launch Operations Center and put on equal footing with other NASA centers. It received its current name on Nov. 29, 1963; just one week after President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

In 1963, construction began on the Apollo-Saturn facilities, some of which are truly monumental. KSC's Vehicle Assembly Building, for example, measures 525 feet tall by 716 feet long by 518 feet wide (160 by 218 by 158 m). The VAB, which was completed in the mid-1960s, remains one of the largest buildings in the world.

Launch elements of NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston — now known as Johnson Space Center — were transferred to KSC in December 1964.

After 1975's manned Apollo-Soyuz Test Project — the first joint U.S.-Soviet spaceflight — NASA began modifying KSC to accommodate the space shuttle, which would make its maiden space voyage in April 1981.

The shuttle served as America's human spaceflight workhorse for the next 30 years, and KSC was the vehicle's home base. Five different orbiters blasted off on a total of 135 space missions from KSC, and most flights landed there, too. (Some touched down at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and one mission landed at New Mexico's White Sands Space Harbor.)

The transition period: The space agency is grooming private American firms to ferry astronauts to and from Earth orbit, and it hopes at least two commercial vehicles will be ready to go by 2017. Meanwhile, NASA is focusing on getting people to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025 and then on to Mars by the mid-2030s — tasks set out by President Barack Obama in 2010.

The end of the shuttle program hit the KSC workforce hard, resulting in the loss of many jobs. But officials are positioning KSC to remain at the forefront of American manned spaceflight activities.

For example, XCOR Aerospace will manufacture its two-person Lynx spacecraft at KSC, and the suborbital rocket plane will launch from the site as well. KSC will also likely serve as home base for Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser space plane and ATK's Liberty Launch system, two vehicles vying to take over the space shuttle's astronaut-taxi role.

And NASA's Space Launch System — the massive new rocket that will blast American crews toward deep space destinations — will take off from KSC as well. The first test flight of the SLS is slated for 2017, and NASA hopes the rocket and its Orion capsule are flying astronauts by 2021.

Further, KSC remains a node of unmanned spaceflight activity. The center manages three pads at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station that have sent off many Earth-observing satellites and interplanetary probes over the years.NASA's $1.1 billion Jupiter-bound Juno probe launched from the Cape in August 2011, for example, as did the $2.5 billion Curiosity Mars rover less than four months later. And in August 2012, the Radiation Belt Storm Probe mission took off from Cape Canaveral, lofting two armored spacecraft into Earth's Van Allen radiation belts. (Space.com)