Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space

Center, episode 223, NASA's 60 Years in Houston. I'm Pat Ryan. On this podcast, we talk

with scientists, engineers, astronauts, and other folks about their part in America's

Space Exploration Program. And today, we're going to shift focus to talk about the place

and spaceflight history of a particular place. This one, the Johnson Space Center.

This civilian space program was born with the passage by Congress of the National Aeronautics

and Space Act, which went into effect on October 1, 1958. As the agency got itself on its

feet in those first few years, it divided up the work among a number of facilities spread

across the country. And in some cases, to centers that did not yet exist, such was the

case. When in 1961, the NASA administrator announced the completion of a location study,

which found that the new manned spaceflight laboratory would be located in Houston, Texas,

on 1,000 acres of land to be made available to the government by Rice University. The

official announcement also found it was important enough to note that the land borders on Clear

Lake and the Houston Light and Power Company saltwater canal. Well, the name was changed

to the manned spacecraft center by the time it opened for business, and years later to

the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. And it has served as the home of human spaceflight

in the United States ever since. Every single American spaceflight with people on board

since Gemini 4 in 1965, the one of which Ed White became the first American to walk in

space, have all been controlled from right here. Every single American astronaut has been

trained for spaceflight right here. When samples of rocks from the moon needed to be preserved

and studied, that happened right here too. But how did some scrubby pasture land on a salty,

lake in southeast Texas come to take its place in spaceflight history? Well, today, on

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