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<\/p>\n Cocoa Beach, Florida
\n \u00a0\u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n Cape Canaveral is no dusty history tour, despite the consecrated status this oceanside resort area holds as the birthplace of American spaceflight. The Space Coast, as it\u2019s often called, is not just where this bold era of science began, with multiple museums to document it. It remains the most active spaceport in the world.\n <\/p>\n
\n Inside the Apollo\/Saturn V hangar at Kennedy Space Center, one of the many artifacts I felt excited to be only feet away from was the Lunar Roving Vehicle, or \u201cmoon buggy,\u201d driven by astronauts on the Apollo 17 mission of 1972. It\u2019s parked in the shadow of the massive Saturn V rocket, which hauled astronauts and their gear in the late 1960s and early \u201970s. Apollo 17 was the last crewed mission to the moon.\n <\/p>\n
\n Turning 180 degrees on my heels, visible through the hangar\u2019s glass doors, the Artemis II rocket was being rolled out to its launchpad at the time of my recent visit, soon to carry the first astronauts back to the moon in more than 50 years.\n <\/p>\n
\n About an hour\u2019s drive from Orlando, Cape Canaveral and the neighboring town of Cocoa Beach entered the public\u2019s consciousness in the early 1960s as the spot on the map where the original seven American astronauts lived, launched and lounged by motel pools. It\u2019s as beautiful a historical destination as you\u2019ll find, with palm trees, ocean waves, a tan sand beach, stunning sunrises and sunsets, and wildlife everywhere.\n <\/p>\n
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\n Once you reach the scenic coastal highway of Route A1A, other than Frank Sinatra wailing \u201cFly Me to the Moon,\u201d you can\u2019t find a better audio companion than a reading of \u201cThe Right Stuff.\u201d Tom Wolfe\u2019s 1979 book chronicles the adventurous origin story and missions of the original Mercury astronauts. The Audible version is entertainingly performed by Dennis Quaid, who played astronaut Gordon Cooper in the 1983 film adaptation. Re-listening to it, this time I started with chapter seven, \u201cThe Cape.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cCape Canaveral was in Florida, but not any part of Florida you would write home about,\u201d Wolfe wrote. \u201cNo, Cape Canaveral was not Miami Beach or Palm Beach or even Key West. Cape Canaveral was Cocoa Beach \u2026 the resort town for all the Low Rent folk who couldn\u2019t afford the beach towns farther south.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Sixty some years later, Cocoa Beach is still not overly developed or catering to wealthy visitors. Among the modestly sized hotel chains and beachside condo units, there are still old-school motels in working order. Among the fast-food restaurant chains are a few establishments with authentic connections to space history, and with better food.\n <\/p>\n
\n While you\u2019re in its orbit, the Space Coast rewires your mental compass, it\u2019s magnetic north pointing to all things cosmic. You bump into it everywhere. There are massive rockets on launch pads in the distance. CBD Vape shops sport tableaus of astronauts with surf boards spray-painted on their walls. A chatty barista tells you he\u2019s a NASA brat. Other local businesses have names such as Space Coast Inn, Starlite Restaurant, Lift Off Lounge, Space-Mann Storage, Launch Pad Bar & Grill and The Astronaut\u2019s Wife (a vintage clothing seller).\n <\/p>\n
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\n Stepping into the lobby of the Courtyard Cocoa Beach Marriott, I was greeted by a replica of a full-size 1980s-era astronaut suit, flanked by two model rockets. Next to them were details of upcoming launches that anyone can watch, including Artemis II. Just off the lobby they have a small glass case with items on loan from one of the local space museums. I hopped on an elevator with a young woman wearing a shirt emblazoned with the famous original blue NASA \u201cmeatball\u201d logo. And when I turned on the TV in my room I found \u201cThe Martian\u201d and \u201cStar Wars\u201d playing two channels apart. There\u2019s no turning off a compass.\n <\/p>\n
\n The first launch-watching tourists who came here in the \u201860s could, if they were so bold, find the internationally famous astronauts simply hanging out at local motels after their long days of training.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cAt night the pool areas of the motels became like the roaring fraternity house lounge of Project Mercury,\u201d Wolfe wrote. \u201cEvery night the fraternal lounge was open, under the skies, in the salt air, out near the beach, and the party was on.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
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\n The most famous of those hangouts was the Holiday Inn, now the La Quinta Inn by Wyndham Cocoa Beach-Port Canaveral<\/a> on North Atlantic Avenue (A1A), and the lobby displays some historic items and a six-foot-tall group photo of the Mercury astronauts. Next to the pool, opposite a shuffleboard court, is a vintage wood sign under small palm trees that reads, \u201cThis Hotel was first owned by the original seven Astronauts in the U.S. Mercury space programs\u2019 \u2018Race for Space,\u2019\u201d and lists their names.\n <\/p>\n \n Evidence of how culturally pervasive Cocoa Beach was in the \u201960s lies across the street from the La Quinta, where I Dream of Jeannie Lane leads to the beachside Lori Wilson Park. The popular sitcom in that decade paired a Cocoa Beach-residing astronaut, played by Larry Hagman, with a sexy 2,000-year-old genie, played by Barbara Eden.\n <\/p>\n \n I also stayed at the Sea Aire Oceanfront Inn<\/a>, where the Mercury 7 astronauts also decamped in their day. Wernher von Braun, who led NASA\u2019S development of the Saturn V rocket after a controversial career start with the Nazi Party in his native Germany, was also a guest. Today, Sea Aire remains a clean and very affordable beachside accommodation of 16 studio rooms with small kitchens. It\u2019s understandably showing a little wear after 75 years of business.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cQuite a little 1960s-style American Rat-Shack Strip was beginning to develop on Route A1A near the Holiday Inn: hamburger restaurants with plate-glass walls and hot magenta lights, night spots with Kontiki roofs,\u201d Wolfe wrote.\n <\/p>\n \n One of those dining spots remains in the town of Cape Canaveral, largely in situ: The Moon Hut<\/a>. Back in the Mercury days, the front door had a giant moon placard around it and served 97-cent \u201cMoonburgers,\u201d according to the original menu on display. With interior windows covered in stickers of official NASA mission patches and related framed newspaper clippings, the popular diner of today still feels like a throwback, albeit one displaying two alien sculptures. At one time the menu was even more kitschy, with names like Eggs-traterrestrial Benedict, but my more reservedly named Interstellar Omelet with hash browns was a hearty way to start a full-day sightseeing mission.\n <\/p>\n \n Zarrella\u2019s<\/a>, a bustling Italian restaurant in the town of Cape Canaveral, is known for its wood-fired pizza and popularity among current and former astronauts. It\u2019s owned by the son of former CNN correspondent John Zarrella, who covered space launches for the network for years. The restaurant hosts an annual benefit auction in which customers bid on original space-inspired cocktail recipes made by astronauts. On display are autographed headshots of many of them.\n <\/p>\n \n Even more legendary is a preserved bar inside the Cocoa Beach Fish Camp Grill<\/a> (serving fried gator, bayou crawfish boil and other \u201cswamp food with a flair\u201d). The building was once the Polaris Motel, which advertised itself as the closest accommodation to the launch pad, back in its day. And the Polaris\u2019 bar, The Mousetrap, was a favorite among astronauts and NASA crew. The original wood paneling, back bar mirror, stained glass panels and tin roof have all been preserved. As I sat at the hallowed bar, because the compass points everything to space, Modest Mouse\u2019s \u201cFloat On\u201d played in the restaurant.\n <\/p>\n \n Chasing down astronaut lore is as simple as strolling on Cocoa Beach itself. As he waited for his cue to enter the stage of space history, Mercury astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, would run the hard-packed sand at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIt was the greatest long-distance running track you could possibly ask for, with pure ocean air to help your pump get going efficiently,\u201d wrote Wolfe in \u201cThe Right Stuff.\u201d \u201cAnd there would be John Glenn, the very picture of astronaut dedication, pounding along the same shore from which he would one day be hurled into the heavens.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n During my own beach runs I saw a heavenly sunrise, a pod of dolphins, the long pier that\u2019s popular with rocket launch watchers, and a three-foot-tall blue heron just feet away from the fisherman who knew him well enough to call him Charlie.\n <\/p>\n The Disneyland of space<\/p>\n \n Just north of the Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral resort towns, past the massive cruise ship docks, lies the actual Cape, mostly a 140,000-acre wildlife sanctuary, but also housing a military base with a constellation of NASA and corporate launch pads dotting the coast.\n <\/p>\n \n The modest Sands Space History Center<\/a>, just outside the main military gate, guides visitors through a photo-led launchpad-by-launchpad tour of the spaceport, detailing the history that took place at each one. I made a quick spin through it, past rocket engines, vacuum-sealed space food and historic video footage, before my guided tour onto the Space Force base that begins there. (Space Force is the newest branch of the US military, since 2019, under the Air Force.)\n <\/p>\n \n These base visits, which must be booked days in advance for the necessary background checks and only open to American citizens, are run by two companies, Canaveral Tours<\/a> and Space Shuttle Excursions<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n As a small group of us sat on the \u201cSpace Shuttle\u201d van waiting to go onto the base, I was excited to get closer to two spots in particular. Hangar S was the primary training, medical and housing facility for the astronauts of Project Mercury. And Launch Complex 34 is now a National Historic Landmark and a memorial to the Apollo 1 astronauts \u2013 Virgil I. \u201cGus\u201d Grissom, Edward H. White II and Roger B. Chaffee \u2013 who lost their lives in 1967 during an accident on the launchpad. (It\u2019s also where they shot a scene with Bruce Willis in the film \u201cArmageddon.\u201d) Turns out the tour goes by neither, but does guide you inside LC-26\u2019s block house and the local historic lighthouse.\n <\/p>\n \n I was also hoping to get a good vantage point to see Artemis II, being rolled out the day I was there, real history in the making.\n <\/p>\n \n But then the military guards at the gate informed our tour guide\/driver that there had been some misplacement with our paperwork and we wouldn\u2019t be allowed to enter. After a few fruitless phone calls, our driver apologized in NASAspeak, \u201cThat\u2019s a scrub, I\u2019m afraid.\u201d Saying it in a cool way didn\u2019t remove the disappointment. \u201cAnd today\u2019s my birthday,\u201d one woman lamented as we disembarked from the shuttle bus.\n <\/p>\n \n But fortunately, there\u2019s more than one way to complete a mission, as the great space movies of \u201cApollo 13,\u201d \u201cGravity\u201d and \u201cThe Martian\u201d teach us.\n <\/p>\n \n I drove about 17 miles, over the Christa McAuliffe Bridge (in honor of the teacher-astronaut who died aboard Space Shuttle Challenger), and past a complex of buildings belonging to the private space travel company Blue Origin, to reach the Disneyland of space: the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n The large visitor center has rides (with science thrown in), IMAX movies, an Astronaut Hall of Heroes, garden walk among old rockets, astronaut holograms, kid-sized space lab tunnels to crawl through, a collection of new and prototyped private spacecraft, and a rather breathtaking reveal of the actual Space Shuttle Atlantis. You can even pay extra to meet a real astronaut. Cinematic Hans Zimmer-esque music is pumped throughout the campus.\n <\/p>\n \n Although my cancelled Space Force tour kept me distant from Apollo 1\u2019s history, I was moved by the memorial section in the Kennedy Space Center, featuring personal items and the actual capsule hatch that failed to open as an electrical fire took the three astronauts\u2019 lives. Another somber space was devoted to those lost in the space shuttle disasters of Columbia in 2003 and Challenger of 1986, the latter Gen X\u2019s (pre-9\/11) Kennedy assassination moment. We all know where we were when we he heard the news.\n <\/p>\n \n What I was most interested in was getting on one of the Space Center\u2019s buses to the Saturn V hangar. That held the right stuff for my interests, including the actual capsules and moon vehicles from the Apollo program, a very rare opportunity to touch a moon rock, and a dramatic mixed-media staging of the Apollo 11 landing, marking the first humans\u2019 walk on the moon.\n <\/p>\n \n From the spectator bleachers behind the hangar, we got a clear view across the Banana River of the Artemis II spacecraft about to end a five-decades long hiatus from crewed lunar missions. It was traveling at 1-mile an hour upon one of NASA\u2019s crawler-transporters, the heaviest self-powered vehicle on Earth. That\u2019s so slow you can\u2019t tell it\u2019s moving from that distance. You exit the hangar through The Right Stuff Gift Shop.\n <\/p>\n \n On the bus ride to and from the Apollo\/Saturn V Center, we passed the 50-something-story-high Vehicle Assembly Building, the largest single-story building (and with the largest doors) in the world. The bus route cuts through Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge and we saw wild turkeys, feral hogs and eagles \u2014 the national bird, given an honorific as the name of Apollo 11\u2019s lander.\n <\/p>\n \n A bit farther west, across the Indian River, is another space industry boom town, Titusville. Its American Space Museum<\/a> is a bit less polished than Sands or Kennedy Space Center, but is packed with highlights, including Gus Grissom\u2019s after-flight suit, large and detailed scale models, numerous lit-up mission control panels, and a room honoring every female astronaut in history, from every country. Shortly, I thought, they\u2019re going to need to add a photo of Christina Koch of the Artemis II mission.\n <\/p>\n \n I asked a staff member how to find the last stop on my self-guided tour: Titusville\u2019s Astronaut Walk of Fame. It was a disappointing answer. \u201cDo you know where the Burger King is?\u201d the staffer started by asking me.\n <\/p>\n \n The Space Walk of Fame consists of three monuments, for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, inside Titusville\u2019s Space View Park. Across the river you could see Artemis II in the distance, on launchpad 39B, ready for its moment in history. When it launches, as early as February 6, the park will no doubt be packed with onlookers.\n <\/p>\n \n As luck would have it, my visit coincided with a postposed launch of a Falcon 9 rocket sending a batch of satellites for Starlink, a communications project run by SpaceX. Shortly before it was scheduled for liftoff, according to the reliably updated Space Coast Office of Tourism\u2019s online tracker<\/a>, I reached Grills Seafood Deck & Tiki Bar<\/a> on the northern edge of Cape Canaveral town, one of several restaurants along the water, near the docked cruise ships.\n <\/p>\n \n Minutes before the scheduled time, a small crowd of patrons gathered along the water\u2019s edge, everyone staring at the cloudy sky above a massive cruise ship and a line of bored pelicans. With 109 launches last year, Cape Canaveral beat its own annual record for them.\n <\/p>\n \n I was talking to my uncle on the phone while I watched for the rocket. He lives about 150 miles down the Florida coast and when I told him what I was doing he stepped outside to see the launch too. He remembered Cocoa Beach in the \u201860s when it was underdeveloped and newly famous, and he told me about meeting Chuck Yeager, the legendary sound barrier-breaking Air Force test pilot featured prominently in Wolfe\u2019s \u201cThe Right Stuff.\u201d Yeager was the folksy but \u201crighteous\u201d precursor to the astronauts.\n <\/p>\n \n Then the SpaceX folks lit up that candle, to describe it in Yeager\u2019s trademark patois. Spectators \u201coohed and aahed,\u201d myself among them, as the rocket\u2019s red flare made entrances and exits between clouds, lighting up the night sky. The noise rumbling in our chests added to the cinematic drama. We clapped when the show was over.\n <\/p>\n \n As I sat at Grills\u2019 outdoor tiki bar, a bartender informed me the kitchen had one order of shark tips left if I wanted \u2018em. And the young man seated next to me noticed my grinning at the launch photos and video I\u2019d just taken on my phone. \u201cThe stoke is always high the first time,\u201d he acknowledged, in surferspeak.\n <\/p>\n \n Then, about the moment the Falcon 9 would be reaching space, the live band behind us played a cover of Bob Dylan\u2019s 1973 song \u201cKnockin\u2019 on Heaven\u2019s Door.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cocoa Beach, Florida \u00a0\u2014\u00a0 Cape Canaveral is no dusty history tour, despite the consecrated status this oceanside resort…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-265070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Inside](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/zwcnn-spacecoast80.jpg\")
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