3,2,1...Liftoff: Building a Way Station to Space

摘要

Cape Canaveral is a protrusion of land, sand, salt grass and thickly matted coastal vegetation jutting from the Florida peninsula into the Atlantic Ocean. First encountered by European explorers and identified on maps as early as 1502, the cape became a milepost and way station by which Western civilization came to the New World. Ponce de Leon, who explored the area around Cape Canaveral in 1513, and multitudes of aerospace engineers, scientists, technicians, administrators, businesses, and their associates throughout the old world and the new, through NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, share a common bond in the continuing exploration of the total human environment. By the close of the millennium Cape Canaveral's John F. Kennedy Space Center had become the base from which the civilizations of Earth were going into space and out to other worlds. Kennedy Space Center's first Director, Dr. Kurt H. Debus, perhaps reflecting on the common heritage of the New World explorers and the Other World explorers engaged in space and planetary exploration, observed that "Space is not something new. It's part of the total environment, and we've been looking for the total environment ever since we looked out of caves at the stars."