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 in space flight history of a particular place. This one, the Johnson

Space Center. America's civilian space program was born with the passage by Congress of the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which went into effect on October 1st, 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 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 Mann Spacecraft Center by the time it opened for business, and

years later to the Linden 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

...