Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center
29.556388888889 - 95.0875Koordinaten: 29 ° 33 ' 23 " N, 95 ° 5' 15 " W
The Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC ) coordinates since 1961 the manned space program of the United States. It is located in Houston (Texas ) and is a facility of NASA.
The JSC is home to the Mission Control Center (MCC ) - the radio call name is "Houston", the seat of the JSC - be guided by the since Gemini 4 in June 1965 all manned space flights. Previously, the leadership was at Langley Research Center in Virginia, where since November 1958, the so-called Space Task Group was housed. This had been entrusted with the implementation of the Mercury program.
Today, the MCC from the flights to the International Space Station are monitored. Also located at JSC, the training center of the U.S. astronauts. In total, more than 14,000 people are employed on the 655 hectare site.
History
When U.S. President John F. Kennedy in May 1961 spent the national target to send within a decade a man to the moon and back to Earth to bring back for sure, NASA was looking for a location for a new center. It should combine and coordinate the Apollo program of the space agency.
In August 1961, NASA Administrator James E. Webb appointed a four-member group under the direction of John F. Parsons with the selection of a suitable site for the Space Task Group. 23 locations were determined and each visited during a two-week tour of inspection. After nine areas were still in the race.
The Parsons team favored the MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa (Florida ). Houston and a material depot in Benicia (California ) were the next places. When the U.S. Air Force their MacDill base but not, as initially intended, wanted to close, the choice was for the new NASA center in Houston, and was announced by Director Webb on September 19, 1961. Just three days later traveled the first representative of the U.S. space agency to Texas.
As a founding date of the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC ) as the JSC was originally called, October 24, 1961 is valid on the day moved into a small NASA delegation some rooms -. Two vacant shops of clothes - in the Gulfgate Shopping Center in the east of the city. Houston was the decision of NASA to locate their new center in the Texas capital, so excited that local firms transformed in no time and free of charge, the rooms in offices. Some flight attendants on Continental Airlines were even borrowed as receptionists.
The MSC was built on an unused area, which gave the Rice University NASA. Until then, grazed cattle herds had on the 400 acres. The land is located in the southeast of Houston, in the district of Clear Lake, the former suburban Clear Lake City, which was incorporated in 1977. In addition, NASA acquired a 240 -acre site to have direct access to the highway. Together with a fallow land oil drilling ordered the space agency over 655 acres of land.
In order to relocate as soon as possible staff to Houston and to begin the work, while the MSC was built on the new grounds, rented one half a dozen offices and buildings of companies. So you worked the studios of the University of Houston, where the internal television program was produced for the computer center to the machine park and stayed with a beverage company. Most of the staff were quartered in the barracks of the old Air Force airfield Ellington Field. In order to get along, they used maps, on which the various temporary locations were entered.
The MSC adopted on March 1, 1962 its operation ( in the rented buildings) on when the director of the new NASA facility, Robert R. Gilruth, his office moved. After about a year it took for the design office for the designs that contracts were awarded for the construction of the first eleven buildings in December 1962. Overall, the NASA were 60 million U.S. dollars in the first year for the MSC. After one year, the new buildings were completed and 2,100 NASA employees moved into their rooms.
Alone, the construction of the MCC had cost the equivalent of 2.7 billion euros.
On February 17, 1973, the MSC was given its present name in honor of former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson.
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The JSC was passed in its history by the following persons: