The origins of KSC and America’s space program can be traced back to the first Cold War, when the conflicting ideologies of the United States and the Soviet Union blossomed into a full-fledged race into space. In an attempt to keep pace with the Russians, America formed the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), ordering the Department of Defense and other ‘rival’ national organizations to step up their own research in the fields of rocketry and the upper atmospheric sciences. Unfortunately, the lack of a unified program and the typical in-house bickering among the Armed Forces combined to severely hamper the nation’s progress toward achieving their number one goal: human spaceflight.

America would receive its wake-up call on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1. Responding to a race the United States was clearly losing, President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA would take control of space away from the Armed Forces and absorb all existing research centers.

NASA began by focusing the bulk of its hundred-million-dollar annual budget on Project Mercury—a series of launches and experiments designed to evaluate whether humans could survive in orbit. Thirty-one months later, Alan Shepard Jr. became the first American to fly into space. Mercury’s success led to the Gemini Project, an extension of the human spaceflight program that utilized a spacecraft built for two astronauts.

President John F. Kennedy recommitted the nation to space in 1961 by announcing his goal to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely before the end of the decade. It was a specific goal—exactly what NASA needed, giving birth to Project Apollo. On July 20, 1969, eight years, eleven missions, and $25.4 billion dollars later, astronaut Neil Armstrong uttered his famous words, ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’

Mankind would take a giant leap backward in 1967, when politics once more interfered with science.

The Outer Space Treaty was a document initiated, negotiated, and rammed through Congress by a group of National Security and State Department officials whose only desire was to use fear to shut down the space program so that monies could be redirected to the Vietnam War. Within four short years, space funding had dropped a crippling 45 percent.

Had this not occurred, the momentum of the Apollo program might have led to the establishment of a moon base in the 1980s and a Mars colony before the year 2010, uniting the global superpowers, preventing the nuclear war of 2012.

More devastating political decisions would follow.

A 1969 task force was asked to come up with three long-range space options. These were: a manned Mars expedition; a space station in lunar orbit with a fifty-person Earth-orbiting station serviced by a reusable ferry, or the Space Shuttle, a vehicle designed to take off as a rocket and return to Earth by gliding home like an unpowered airplane.

President Nixon opted for the Space Shuttle.