The ship channel, Oil, and Two World Wars made Houston what it is. The second age of discovery may make it what it becomes. As Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Balboa, Magellan, Captain Cook, and others opened the unexplored seas and lands of the earth during the first age of discovery, so the men who are opening the unexplored space of the universe have begun the second age.
In 1961, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided to build its Manned Spacecraft Center near Houston, the city began an identity with the old ports of western Europe that played leading roles in the great adventures of two, three, and four centuries ago. Technical direction of America’s effort to put the first man on the moon will come from Houston.
The government is spending well over a hundred million dollars—it may come to far more than that in the end—to build office buildings, laboratories, and massive test communications and control facilities on range land near Clear Lake. The millions of dollars to be invested by industry to serve the center are incalculable. Slowly the character of the city will change as the migration of space scientists merges with Houston and with oil, the city’s mover and shaker for half a century. “It is likely,” the Dallas News said in 1962, “that even many Houstonians have no conception of what is happening and what it may mean to their community.”
Salvador Dali’s surrealistic impression of Houston was a result of his visit to the city in 1952. The flaming giraffes symbolize oil derricks, at which a woman, her face covered with camellias, looks with eager expectation. The port and the pioneers are shown in other symbols.
This, apparently painted in the 1920s, is an unknown artist’s conception of Houston in 1980.
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When the astronauts moved to Houston in 1962, their presence gave breath to what had seemed a fantasy to many Houstonians, who more than most Americans will experience vicariously the most extraordinary adventure in history. How far Houston has come since two New Yorkers paid $9,428 for a townsite and named it for the hero of the Battle of San Jacinto! The interval between that date and the arrival of the astronauts was but 125 years. What is Houston that it has become so much?