1963 cartoon from the Times-Picayune underscores the distinct geography of the space program. (Below right) The 525-foot tall Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral Florida, where rockets were vertically assembled.

The Manned Space Center/Cape Canaveral Houston, TX and Cape Canaveral, FL

When NASA was created in 1958, policy makers built its bureaucratic structure around the old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), an organization formed before World War I to coordinate research on aviation. Assistant director of NACA Robert Gilruth became the new head of the Space Task Group, the division of NASA responsible for manned space flight (Gilruth and other NACA employees had worked in conjunction with the Air Force on the "X-series" of supersonic rocket jets). In response to Soviet accomplishments in space, Gilruth's Space Task Group announced Project Mercury, the first American manned space mission, in 1958. When President Kennedy declared his intentions to send men to the moon in May 1961, it fell on Gilruth's shoulders to accomplish the task.

Among its other scattered research facilities, NACA headquarters was located at Langley Field Virginia. Gilruth preferred that the facility be expanded in the wake of Kennedy's ambitious call for an accelerated manned space program. Instead, the Army Corps of Engineers broke ground on a massive new Manned Spaceflight Center on land owned by Rice University outside of Houston, Texas - home state of Lyndon Johnson, Overton Brooks and Olin Teague, powerful legislators sitting on Congress's Space and Appropriations Committees. NASA director James Webb, a lawyer keenly attuned to the pragmatic realities of congressional politics, succinctly summed up the situation for Gilruth: "Tell me, Bob. What's Harry Byrd [Virginia Senator and persistent critic of the space program] ever done for you?" (Webb himself was the protege of another powerful Southwestern Senator, Robert Kerr of Oklahoma).

The impact of Congress's political geography on the space program was evident. As one historian of the space program has noted, "The Apollo complex took the shape of a crescent moon running around the Gulf of Mexico from Texas to Florida." Cape Canaveral was chosen as a permanent launch site in 1961, while Saturn contractors utilized the Michoud, Louisiana facility, a converted government plant.