They call it Space City, U.S.A.
Drive along Highway 50 into
Titusville, just across the Indian River
from
NASA's Kennedy Space
Center, and you’ll pass a
Space Shuttle Inn, Shuttle Car Wash, and
Space Coast Pawn &
Jewelry. One of the town's two high schools is called Astronaut High.
There's an elementary school called Apollo.
Shuttle technician
Dan Quinn can't go shopping at the local Walmart without running into
co-workers from Kennedy, by far the town's largest employer. His kids
used to play a game: Guess how many friends Dad's going to see. Five?
Six? Quinn would buy the winner a candy bar.
Like Hollywood and
the movies, Detroit and its cars, Titusville's fortunes have long been
tied to aerospace. Prospering during the Apollo heyday, declining when
the program was halted. Expanding with the shuttle program, taking a hit
with the disasters of Challenger and Columbia.
Now, as
NASA prepares to ground
its shuttle fleet permanently, Titusville's 45,000 residents are left to
wonder what's next.
The late 1960s and early 1970s were when the
Apollo
spaceflight program reached its height, putting
men on the moon. More
than 24,000 people moved to Titusville, eager to work at the new
Kennedy Space Center and
help the country win the
space
race.
Quinn's dad, an electrical engineer, was part of
the team that built Apollo's lunar module. The family lived in
New Mexico at the time,
but "my father always brought us out to Kennedy for the open houses and
to see the launch area," said Quinn, 56. They watched every blastoff
together. It seemed then that the whole nation's — the whole world's —
eyes were fixed on the cosmos. That sense of collective awe helped
inspire him to follow his father into aerospace, ultimately moving to
Titusville to work at Kennedy Space Center more than two decades ago.
But
Titusville suffered when Apollo's missions to the moon abruptly ended
in 1972. The town's growth, once exponential, ground to a halt. Al
Koller, a longtime resident (Titusville High class of 1959) and an
electrical engineer for NASA during the Apollo boom, remembers the
program shutdown as an abrupt reversal of fortune locally.
"Friends
would become enemies because they were laid off and I wasn't," said
Koller, who retired from NASA in 1992. "Neighbors on either side of me
were in the process of bailing out of their homes because they couldn't
afford to remain here after they were laid off. Close to the end, you
could buy almost any kind of house for no money down."
And then
the
space shuttle program
rode to the rescue. It wasn't Apollo — Titusville experienced a sharp
decline in tourism after that golden era — but it rekindled excitement.
Marcia
Gaedke moved to Titusville when she was 2, at the tail end of the
Apollo era — too young to remember the city's economic descent. What she
remembers is that shuttle launches became "a part of life" when the
first orbiter, Columbia, went up on April 12, 1981.
"Growing up in Titusville, I hardly knew anyone who didn’t have some
sort of connection to Kennedy Space Center," said Gaedke, now president
of the city's Chamber of Commerce. "Everyone had a mom, uncle, cousin
who worked there."
The program brought its share of visitors,
too — sometimes in the tens of thousands — vying for the best launch
vantage point at places like Space View Park.
But when the
space shuttle Challenger
exploded while departing from Earth in 1986, and Columbia broke apart
upon its return in 2003, the town despaired. After each disaster, the
shuttle program experienced years-long hiatuses for the ensuing
investigations. The influx of tourists — and the income of the
businesses that depended on them — dwindled.
And the pain
wasn't just economic but deeply personal.
"Losing those seven
[Columbia] astronauts was like losing my brothers and sisters," said Dan
Quinn, who has six siblings, two of them retired aerospace workers. At
the time of the 2003 disaster, he'd been working on the shuttles'
thermal protection system.
Early the next year, President George W. Bush announced that
the aging shuttle fleet would be mothballed in 2010. Taking its place
would be a new program,
Constellation,
to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020 and onward to Mars.
The
news may not have spelled the end, but it was still a blow to the town.
"To people like me, who have grown up with the shuttle program, its
retirement is like losing a family member," Gaedke said.
The hope
around
Titusville
and
Kennedy Space Center
was that most of the 8,000 NASA shuttle contract workers would simply
flow into corresponding positions in the Constellation program. But
preliminary
projections two years ago found that Kennedy could lose as
much as 80 percent of its contract workforce, about 6,400 jobs.
As
if that wasn't bad enough, this year Obama revealed a
2011
budget with no money allocated for Constellation, effectively
canceling Bush’s plan and instead recommending that the focus be on
privatized spaceflight. Though Congress still has to OK the measure,
Titusville faces the possibility of another economic upheaval.
"It’s
like déjà vu," an echo of President Nixon axing the Apollo mission,
Koller said. "We have a lot of frightened people here, not ready to end
their careers. They don't know what in the world they are going to do."
Yes,
Koller said, it's true that Titusville isn't as dependent on aerospace
as it was in the '70s — the shuttle workforce is half the size of
Apollo's, and the city is about twice as big now — but thousands still
depend on the space industry. “I’d say the situation is actually worse
now," he said, "because the economy is flat. ’72 and ’73 wasn’t that
great either, but it wasn’t like this. People could at least go and find
a new job."
The town's contraction has already begun. Since
Bush's announcement of the shuttles' retirement, enrollment at
Astronaut High School —
built in 1962 to accommodate the Apollo boom — is down more than a
third, Principal Terry Humphrey said.
"There’s lots of people
with long faces here," he said. "A lot of the folks who knew the end [of
the shuttle program] was coming left. And the students that remain are
concerned that their parents won’t have paying jobs soon." The city's
other high school is also on the decline, and five of the city's six
elementary schools are now eligible for federal assistance because they
have such large low-income populations.
"About 25 percent of the
students have direct ties to the space center, but when you add those
who are tied indirectly — the people who support the space program, the
construction workers, local businesses, food providers, et cetera — the
number goes up a whole lot," Humphrey said. "We’re all somehow connected
to the space center; it’s what drives our economy."
It's also
central to the town’s pride. What kind of future is in store for Space
City, U.S.A., with the shuttle program shutting down and nothing to fill
its vacuum? Will it be a commercial center for spaceflight? And if
aerospace does become a largely private endeavor, will companies want to
move operations elsewhere?
The space industry is "so much a part
of our heritage and history," said Gaedke, the Chamber of Commerce
president. She hasn't given up. "Hopefully we’ll fight tooth and nail
for it to stay in Titusville."
Quinn is trying to stay positive
too. "I'm hoping we’ll have another program to go to. If not, well, you
know, we'll just cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now, my
whole team’s just focused on flying out the last few missions, proving
our abilities to get men safely into space."
Koller, who has
lived most of his life in
Titusville
and is now an advisor to aerospace students at community colleges, has
the next generation in mind. He tells them to be flexible about their
career ambitions and to remember that their skills are transferrable:
"For instance, if you can be a good aerospace technician, you can be a
skilled medical technician."
But like Quinn, the NASA retiree is a
second-generation "rocket rat" — his dad was an aerospace worker, too —
and space is in his blood. He can't imagine leaving this home, a place
from which so many people have blasted off for the great unknown.
"I
found my little piece of heaven."
David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
Creative Writer
