Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

After Kennedy’s speech, finding a site was the first item on the agenda. NASA already had use of the Air Force facility at Cape Canaveral; the obvious course would be to graft the Apollo facility onto it. But in many ways Cape Canaveral was not a good place to launch large rockets. In 1961, the local labor force was too small to supply the manpower that would be required for the construction. The Cape coast was prone to rain, lightning, and strong winds throughout the year and hurricanes during the fall. Worse yet, the weather was unpredictable, a nasty problem with a large vehicle sitting out in the open on a launch pad. Even when the weather was sunny, the humidity and the salt air corroded metal and insinuated gremlins into delicate electronics. Cape Canaveral was not an ideal place. But alternative sites with better weather and larger labor forces had to be considered with this in mind: The destructive equivalent of a fair-sized nuclear weapon might one day explode on the premises (the Saturn V had the explosive potential of a million pounds of T.N.T.). This meant, first, that the site had to be large enough for its facilities to be built at safe distances from the launch pads. It had, in fact, to be huge. Second, the site had to be distant from major population centers, so that if an errant Saturn did “get outside the gate,” as the engineers euphemistically put it, it would not immolate a large number of people. Third, because things could go wrong at any time in the ...