Published March 21, 2019
One in an occasional series
The 1,600-acre plot south of Houston was desolate and remote.
Cattle grazed the land, nestled between old farming and fishing communities and a body of water known as Clear Lake.
It was 1961 and the fields soon would be home to NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center, a $60 million hub for human spaceflight.
The site, named the Johnson Space Center in 1973 in honor of former President Lyndon B. Johnson, beat out 22 other locations to host the greatest minds of the generation.
“It was the new frontier,” said Melissa Kean, a Rice University historian. “There was tremendous excitement about the technological changes that were coming and the economic affects of this.”
In this 1961 file photo, H.H. Smith points out the future site for the Johnson Space Center, which as the time was America’s largest space lab. Smith was manager of the Clear Lake ranch, owned by Humble Oil Company, which gave the 1,000-acre site to Rice University on condition it be used for a space center. Rice donated the land to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (NASA)
Space City was born. The Houston area quickly embraced the fervor of the space race, developing an Astrodomain that included the Astrodome and nearby Astroworld. Businesses proudly endorsed the space program, adopting space-related names that to this day evoke images of grand adventures and boundless opportunity.
MISSION MOON: Read our entire series here
Schools, streets and buildings adopted the space moniker, hailing a time when easily recognizable astronauts and their families settled in the area. Murals were painted, signs were hung and famous NASA slogans — “The Eagle Has Landed” and “Houston, we have a problem” — adorned banners and signs everywhere.
And for the last five decades, the region has thrived, holding firmly onto its role as home to the nation's astronaut corps and as a hub for human spaceflight research and training.
It’s the storied home of mission control, where greats like Gene Kranz — famous for his role in saving the Apollo 13 crew in 1970 as flight director — and first flight director Christopher Kraft lived and worked. It was home to Space Shuttle operations from the 1980s to 2011 when the program was shuttered. And it remains the base of operations for the International Space Station.
Even the Orion program — billed to take humans back to the moon for the first time in 50 years — is managed from Johnson Space Center.
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And experts believe Houston will remain important to the space community even as commercial companies have started taking the reins of projects once controlled by NASA.
U.S. Rep. Brian Babin, who represents the district that includes NASA, has vowed to maintain the Johnson Space Center’s role in space exploration.
“When we again land Americans on the Moon, then Mars, and beyond, I want to make sure that first word from that surface will always be, ‘Houston,’” Babin wrote in a op-ed published in the Houston Chronicle in July.
When Houston was picked as NASA’s human spaceflight home in 1961, newspapers hailed it as a win for the city. The agency’s “science nerve center” would bring money, jobs and people to the area, according to a Sept. 19, 1961 package of stories in the Chronicle.
“This will make Houston the command post for the nation’s first attempt to put a man on the moon and beyond,” the Chronicle stated. The site “is the most important piece of real estate in the country today.”
About 1,000 acres for the site was donated to the government by Rice University, which received the Clear Lake pasture land from Humble Oil and Refining Company, later known as Exxon Mobil.
The spot fit the criteria laid out by the agency: nearby water transportation, a moderate climate, close proximity to universities and strong electric and water supplies, among other things, according to Henry C. Dethloff’s book, “Suddenly, Tomorrow Came: The NASA History of Johnson Space Center.”
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Experts at the time told the Chronicle that Houston was chosen because of its “highly skilled craftsmen.”
“We have 22,000 skilled craftsmen in this area, available for work on the space laboratory project,” N.E. Coward, executive secretary of the Harris County AFL-CIO Council, told reporters at the time.
But the selection also had political roots. Congressman Albert Thomas, a Texas Democrat whose district included the area, was chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee that oversaw the NASA budget. Thomas attended Rice, was a close political ally of Johnson’s and was roommates with George R. Brown, one of Johnson’s most important political and financial backers who also was chairman of the Rice Board of Trustees at the time, Kean said.
It benefited everyone involved, she added, to have the NASA center relocated to Houston from Langley Aeronautical Center in Virginia.
“We actually gave NASA what they needed. It wasn’t just like some crony deal,” Kean said. “It was one of those deals that’s a perfect Houston deal. Everybody won.”
Regardless of why Houston was picked, hundreds of workers quickly descended on the area. NASA officials started training businesses on how to bid for and win government contracts. Housing developments went up at lightning speed and the Texas Legislature authorized the construction of NASA Road 1, which runs in front of the center.
By 1965, nearly 5,000 federal employees and almost twice as many contractors were employed at the space center, all working toward President John F. Kennedy’s goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
Home to just 6,520 people prior to NASA’s arrival, Clear Lake was an area where land sold for less than $750 per acre and the biggest industries — outside of oil and gas — were agriculture as well as oyster harvesting and shrimping in nearby Seabrook and Kemah, according to a chapter written by Kevin Brady in “The Societal Impact of Spaceflight.”
The new NASA center dramatically changed that.
“In my mind, Johnson Space Center is the modern-day equivalent of Amazon HQ 2,” said Ray Viator, author of the book “Houston: Space City USA.” “We’re competing for a facility that they’re going to spend $200 million building, has $60 million in annual payroll and is overseeing a billion dollars in contracts.”
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Companies like Humble began building new restaurants, motels, shopping centers, banks and even a golf course in the Clear Lake area. National aerospace companies established bases in the area. And construction projects used primarily local labor, meaning most of that money was funneled back into the community.
By the late 1960s, the Clear Lake area population had skyrocketed to 45,000 with 125 different national firms established in the area.
Nassau Bay — where many of the astronauts and other NASA personnel still live — was born during this time, and communities like nearby Friendswood blossomed from a community of 75 Quakers to a land filled with new shopping malls and subdivisions where NASA legends took up residence.
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A March 9, 1969 Chronicle article stated that real estate experts believed that $1 billion in private funds had been committed to the area.
“The space center payroll makes these developments attractive,” the article stated. “The average salary at MSC runs slightly more than $8,000.”
Local companies, such as Brown & Root, Inc., also benefited. In 1962, the company — owned by George R. Brown — was awarded a $1.5 million contract for architectural design work for the center, Brady stated. That’s the equivalent of $12.5 million today.
“By the late 1960s, the total amount of NASA contracts awarded to … companies, along with other Houston-based businesses cooperating with the [center], was more than $643 billion, which was poured directly into Texas’s economy,” Brady wrote. “Thus, the federal funds encouraged and supported future growth and expansion in southeast Texas.”
In front of a mural on the school gym depicting students gazing toward space, members of the robotics team at McWhirter Elementary work on a project on Dec. 15, 2014, in Webster.
(File | Houston Chronicle)Rice also experienced growth and success from having a federal center of such scientific clout less than 40 miles away, Kean said.
University officials started a new Space Science Department that focused on geomagnetism, atmospheric dynamics and planetary structures. NASA then gave them $1.6 million to build a Space Science and Technology Building. The department grew from nine graduate students in 1963 to 50 just three years later, many of whom worked at the NASA center, according to Brady.
And because of their close proximity to the center, Rice students and faculty had increased access to research grants and contracts, Kean said.
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“There was a significant amount of funding that came to campus,” she said. “We now had the ability and people and resources to suddenly be doing space-age work on campus. It brought in all kinds of young, exciting, vibrant people working in a brand new field of studying space.”
Other local institutions such as the University of St. Thomas, the University of Houston and Baylor University College of Medicine also received funds for specific space projects.
“Although the agency did not utilize the [Texas center] as a site to launch rockets into space, the installation did launch southeast Texas into an orbit of growth and prosperity as the federal complex brought international attention to the region and made Houston the focal point of the space age fever that was spreading throughout the nation,” Brady wrote.
The center has continued to be a boon for universities in the area and many currently have working relationships with NASA because of it.
Behind one of seven obelisks displaying student art work depicting a space theme, students at McWhirter Elementary play on rocket-shaped playground equipment on Monday, Dec. 15, 2014, in Webster.
(File | Houston Chronicle)More than 50 years have passed since NASA officials first declared the Clear Lake area its hub for human spaceflight.
Astronauts still live and train there, as do the mission controllers who keep the astronauts safe. Some things have changed, however.
The region surrounding the center — which includes Clear Lake City, Clear Lake Shores, El Lago, Kemah, League City, Nassau Bay, Seabrook, Taylor Lake Village and Webster — now has a population of more than 140,000.
More than 34,000 single-family homes now stand in the area including Clear Lake, Nassau Bay and Seabrook, according to figures provided by the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership.
And homes in Clear Lake City now sell for between $150,000 and $1.3 million, said Dan McCarver, a longtime real estate agent with Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate Gary Greene.
“Before NASA, Clear Lake was just a cattle pasture and a place where Humble Oil was trying to pump oil,” said Patrick Jankowski, senior vice president of research at the Greater Houston Partnership. “If it hadn’t been for NASA, there would be no Clear Lake.”
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Today, about 80,000 people work within a five-mile radius of the center. That includes the more than 10,000 contractors and federal employees who work at Johnson, as well as individuals who work in the chemical and health care industry in the area.
“The oil and gas industry has its ups and downs, but JSC is always there,” said Jankowski. “As long as we’re trying to put men into space, JSC will have a role. Both in space and Houston’s economy.”
Experts say this will remain true even as commercial companies such as SpaceX, Boeing and Blue Origin continue to expand their role in space exploration.
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“Turning exceptional human and technical achievement into the norm is what makes Johnson Space Center (JSC), NASA and Houston relevant,” Johnson Director Mark Geyer told the Chronicle in January. “As we realize each step in that objective, we need to be careful not to confuse becoming a societal norm as becoming irrelevant - it is likely more accurately described as reaching the very peak of relevance.”
The increasing involvement of commercial companies is an opportunity for the space agency to return to its roots, focusing on human space exploration after two decades of sending astronauts to the same place in low Earth orbit, where the station flies.
“Houston is the home of the nation’s astronaut corps and mission control. We plan the missions. We train the crews. We control the flights from here, in Space City,” Geyer said. “Houston was the first word spoken from the surface of the moon, and it remains the first word in world human spaceflight today.”
Flags line NASA Road 1, temporarily renamed the John Glenn Parkway, on Oct. 15, 1998, in Webster. The small Houston suburb neighboring NASA's Johnson Space Center approved the name-change to honor Glenn's return to space. (Associated Press)
Alex Stuckey joined the Chronicle as the NASA, science and environment reporter in 2017. She is a 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner for her work at the Salt Lake Tribune on how Utah colleges handle reports of sexual assault. That same year, she was named a Livingston Finalist and, several years prior, won an Investigative Reporters and Editors award for a story on the failed reporting of drug seizures in Ohio that resulted in a seven-year jail sentence for former Athens County Sheriff Pat Kelly. Contact her at alex.stuckey@chron.com. Follow her on Twitter at @alexdstuckey.
Katherine Feser covers a variety of subjects for the Houston Chronicle Business section. She coordinates some of the paper's most popular special sections, including the Chronicle 100, Home Price Survey, and Top Workplaces. Contact her at katherine.feser@chron.com. Follow her on Twitter at @kfeser.
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