Florida Space Coast bounces with the help of SpaceX, Boeing and Blue Origin

CAP CANAVERAL, Florida – The crowd was packed along the same beach, the cameras ready. Their eyes landed on the site that sent men to the moon 50 years ago, but that had now become the perch of another powerful rocket ready to fly.

The scene here last month was both familiar and nostalgic, the past rekindled. But it was also quite different. The rocket on the platform, the Falcon Heavy, was developed not by NASA but by a private company, SpaceX.

Many in the crowd were not born when Walter Cronkite recounted the lunar landing for millions of people and that part of the coastline had a sacrosanct place in the national consciousness. Instead, in the years following the Apollo era, Cape Town became a symbol of abandoned dreams and reduced ambitions that eventually led to the Space Shuttle's retirement eight years ago and at the end of the flight human space from the American soil.

Now, however, the Space Coast is coming back. Many companies have claimed the old government pitchers. The buildings left vacant were demolished or rebuilt. And Cape Town is again on the verge of sending human beings back into space for the first time since 2011, crescendo of a new invigorated space age, which many hope to give back to the pride of 39, a bygone era.

As life revives on this venerable coast, the resurrection announces itself well, in an entirely new form, much more unstable and unpredictable than that infused by government money in the sixties. Today, the new space age is based on the fortunes of private companies, subject to the vagaries of the economy. And as the next chapter of the great American adventure in space, the future of the Space Coast is far from guaranteed.

After seeing the devastation that can occur when a city dependent on a single sector collapses, local leaders have gone to great lengths to try to diversify their economy. They set up special tax districts and offered incentives to woo all kinds of businesses to create a better sense of stability.

But it's a place where kids go to the astronaut high school, where area code 321 is designed to mimic the launch's countdown and reminds of the space age, including astronaut monuments and Apollo Road and Tranquility Streets. .

It is here that was born the era of space, with his heroes named John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride. It was there that the crowds piled up on the beaches before the launch, counted in unison and captivated the imagination of the world.

And it was not.

The question now is: can he again?

Big rockets, big dreams

At the dawn of the space age, this swampy coastline quickly became a thriving city. Driven by the cold war to defeat the Soviet Union on the moon, the population has soared with engineers and rocket specialists. Astronauts with "good equipment" are trained running on the beach during the day and party at night on the Cocoa Beach Strip full of jazz clubs and restaurants.

It was "a glamorous, honky-tonk city with girls in bars, players playing poker upstairs, a lot of noise," Gay Talese wrote in The New York Times in 1965.

"It was a total enthusiasm," said 78-year-old Roy Tharpe, who grew up in the area and began working for NASA in 1963. "It seemed like we were launching rockets every three or four days – and they exploded all the time. "

If Cape Town had a cathedral, it was Launch Complex 39A. Built for Apollo missions, its arrow was more than 500 meters high and had sent Apollo astronauts on the moon in July 1969 on a Saturn V rocket so powerful it felt like an earthquake.

After Apollo, 39A is reborn as the host of the space shuttle launches. But after 30 years of closing the shuttle program, the venerable launch site began to rust in the salt air, joining the many other abandoned platforms that dot the cape, like the ruins of a once formidable civilization.

At the height of the recession, the unemployment rate in Brevard County, where the Space Coast
is largely based, boosted to 12 percent. The real estate market has plummeted. The median price of single-family homes rose from nearly $ 250,000 in 2007 to less than $ 100,000 in 2011.

"What we had not planned, is that [the shuttle retirement] will coincide with the recession – the deepest and longest recession, "said Lynda Weatherman, President and CEO of the Space Coast Economic Development Commission. "I saw the numbers and it was bad. And Florida was a bad place, especially Brevard, especially for the housing markets. So we got caught.

In 2013, the maintenance of the 39A platform cost NASA $ 100,000 per month and even a spokesman admitted at the time that the launch pad "had not been maintained". Since this facility was registered in the National Register of Historic Places, it could not be demolished. . NASA was desperate to find someone to use it – even a start-up that was unlikely to drive the commercialization of space.

SpaceX, the Californian company founded by Elon Musk, was looking for a new springboard and obtained the necessary rights to take over the site. The company had obtained contracts from NASA for freight transportation to the International Space Station and was recovering commercial launch contracts abroad. With a growing manifesto, and perhaps a quantum faith in the future, SpaceX was looking to expand.

Others followed quickly.

Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, made a last-minute bid to claim 39A, triggering a feud with Musk's SpaceX. But without a rocket able to fly from the site, Blue Origin has been repulsed. (Bezos owns the Washington Post.)

Instead, he was aiming for another relic disappearing, the dashboard 36, just down the road. With 145 launches, including the Mariner missions, which sent sensors into the solar system, it was also withering away. In 2015, Blue Origin signed an agreement on the new rocket it was developing, named New Glenn.

"The tablet had been silent for over 10 years – too long," said Bezos at the time. "We can not wait to solve this problem."

Blue Origin has also built a major rocket manufacturing facility nearby, with the intention of expanding it. OneWeb, a satellite company wishing to create a global Internet system networked from space, has also opened a new factory.

Boeing took over an old space shuttle processing facility where he built a spacecraft designed to allow NASA astronauts to fly in space from another nearby launch pad.

NASA is developing a huge rocket, the Space Launch System, which should allow astronauts to go to the moon within five years. NASA is fighting to get its first launch with the Orion Crew Cap, built by Lockheed Martin next year.

A second act

The future of the Space Coast is also written by small start-up companies that are beginning to emerge in an industry once dominated by major government programs and subcontractors of the military-industrial complex.

A San Francisco-based company called Relativity, founded by former employees of Blue Origin and SpaceX, is working on a rocket entirely built in 3D printing. The goal is to be able to launch small satellites quickly and cheaply. The company recently signed an agreement to take over the Cape 16 launch pad.

At Stage 20, another young company, Firefly, intends to launch rockets that she plans to build in a nearby facility.

Overall, the activity helps NASA achieve its goal of transforming the government-dominated Kennedy Space Center into a multi-tenant facility that introduces a new space economy.

"If you consider that in the entire history of humanity, only three countries have sent human beings into space: the United States, Russia and China," said Robert Cabana , director of NASA's Kennedy Space Center. "Today, several US companies are building space vehicles to take humans into space."

Outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center, developers are building residential communities along the coast. The unemployment rate fell to less than 4% earlier this year. The tax base exploded with the rebound in monthly taxable sales, which rose from nearly $ 450 million in 2010 to over $ 850 million last year. And housing prices have returned to their pre-recession level.

Weatherman, chairman of the local economic development commission, first said the coast was "a launching site". "But we knew we could do more than that."

The City of Titusville recently posted a video highlighting all the ongoing development in the city: an 18,000-square-foot guard, a 170-unit subdivision, a new Hyatt, and a new Marriott.

The Miracle City Mall, demolished after the recession, has been rebuilt to become a new shopping center, with a new Harley Davidson dealership. Nearby you will find a trendy pub-brasserie that serves cheese macaroons and fine cocktails such as "creamsicle fizz".

"We have our own Starbucks," said Jim Hale, who works as a volunteer with the Air Force Space and Missile Museum. "It was great. . . . Now everything is new again. "

In the end, the double-shot of the loss of the shuttle program and the recession was devastating, leaving the streets filled with empty buildings. But it was not as bad as it could have been. "We were preparing for a Category 5 hurricane," said Robin Fisher, a former county commissioner. "We have a category 3."

At the end of the shuttle program, a new commercial space industry was beginning to take shape. We did not know what his future was or how successful he would be. But there was an enthusiasm that surrounded him and local officials adopted him.

"It was the second act for space in our county," Weatherman said.

Nevertheless, space is a risky business. Many newcomers are trying to mark Cape Town, but they will not survive all. And for all the success stories here, there have been missteps. SpaceX detonated two rockets, one destroying a buffer at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base. Then, recently, one of his guns exploded during an engine test, sending a huge plume of smoke over Cape Town.

NASA sold some facilities to promising private companies that ended up collapsing.

"It did not work," said Cabana, director of the Kennedy Space Center. Some "lost deals that they thought they were getting, and the end result was that they had not succeeded."

There is a lot of enthusiasm and enthusiasm for the commercial space industry. The investment money flows. New companies seem to appear every day. But we may remember the old maxim: the fastest way to become a millionaire in space is to start as a billionaire.

A new arrival

They had packed the beaches again. This time, we are launching the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket in the world currently in operation.

On takeoff, he named the plate 39A on a hot day Thursday in April, in a thunder of smoke.

On the beaches, the crowds did not come only for the launch, but a little rocket art unimaginable a generation ago.

Instead of dropping its thrusters into the ocean after flight, SpaceX sends them back for re-use. A bit of aerobatics, according to the company, can reduce the cost of space flights.

That day, the two side boosters regained one of Cape Town's newest structures: a pair of landing strips. The crowds bent their heads to watch the boosters land in unison, two sonic booms announcing their arrival.

Hale, a volunteer from the Air Force Museum, watched from a nearby park with his wife, stunned, this new chapter evoking a memory of the old and a question, "Where is Walter Cronkite when you have need him?

[Get notified about The Post’s new podcast about the history of the space race, launching this summer]

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