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On this day in space! July 1, 1962: Kennedy Space Center established

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Happy birthday, Kennedy Space Center!

A large brown and white building with the NASA logo sits nexts to the marshes.
The Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center in Titusville, Florida. (Image credit: NASA)

On July 1, 1962, NASA established the Launch Operations Center — which was later renamed the Kennedy Space Center — on the east coast of Florida.

After President John F. Kennedy famously said that American astronauts would land on the moon by 1970, NASA had to build a launch facility for their gigantic new Saturn V rocket.

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The facilities at Cape Canaveral couldn't support such an enormous vehicle, so NASA started building their new launch center just a few miles away on Merritt Island.

Since the 1960s, this spaceport has supported all crewed spaceflight missions from the U.S., including all of the Apollo moon missions and 135 space shuttle flights.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

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Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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