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The John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC, originally known as the NASA Launch Operations Center), located on Merritt Island, Florida, is one of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) ten field centers. Since 1968, KSC has been NASA's primary launch center of American spaceflight, research, and technology.
Kennedy Space Center, operated by NASA, has two launch complexes on Merritt Island comprising four pads—two active, one under lease, and one inactive.From 1967 to 1975, it was the site of 13 Saturn V launches, three crewed Skylab flights and the Apollo–Soyuz; all Space Shuttle flights from 1981 to 2011, and one Ares 1-X flight in 2009.
The facility is south-southeast of NASA's Kennedy Space Center on adjacent Merritt Island, with the two linked by bridges and causeways. The Cape Canaveral Space Force Station Skid Strip provides a 10,000-foot (3,000 m) runway [6] close to the launch complexes for military airlift aircraft delivering heavy and outsized payloads to the Cape.
The name restoration to Cape Canaveral became official on 9 October 1973. [37] [38] Senator Ted Kennedy had stated in 1970 that it was a matter to be decided by the citizens of Florida. [34] The Kennedy family issued a letter stating they "understood the decision". NASA's Kennedy Space Center retains the "Kennedy" name. [39]
The center, which opened December 17, 1996, [26] was designed by Bob Rogers and the design team BRC Imagination Arts, [27] for NASA and Delaware North Companies. The opening of the exhibit was historic for NASA as it was the first large exhibit to be opened inside a restricted area, only accessible by Kennedy Space Center tour buses. [3]
In March 2010, the USAF 45th Space Wing issued real property licenses to Space Florida for Space Launch Complexes 36 and 46 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. [11] [12] Moon Express leased the pad in February 2015 from Space Florida as a development and test site for its commercial lunar operations and its lunar lander flight test vehicles ...
With the advent of the Space Shuttle program in the early 1980s, the original structure of the launch pads were remodeled for the needs of the Space Shuttle.Pad 39A hosted all Space Shuttle launches until January 1986, when Space Shuttle Challenger would become the first to launch from pad 39B during the ill-fated STS-51-L mission, which ended with the destruction of Challenger and the death ...
Previous Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Master Plan recommendations—in 1966, 1972, and 1977—noted that an expansion of KSC's vertical launch capacity could occur when the market demand existed. The 2007 Site Evaluation Study recommended an additional vertical launch pad, Launch Complex 49 (LC-49), to be sited north of existing LC-39B.