In the 1950s the marshy, mosquito-infested lowlands of Florida, christened Cape Canaveral (“place of the caneâ€), began to be covered with concrete for ICBM launching pads. As authors Lipartito (Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture
) and Butler (Manufacturing the Future: A History of Western Electric
) relate, although Americans remember the cape and its control center, the Kennedy Space Center, as the site of media circuses surrounding early manned space missions, between 1958 and 1967 several hundred unmanned rockets blasted off into the Florida skies, sometimes two a day. NASA divided its early years on the cape between fighting turf battles with the military and moving tons of earth to fill in the marshes. As the authors describe, many of the space center's early administrators—notably Kurt Debus, who had worked on the V-2 rocket with Werner von Braun at Peenemünde—were hands-on engineering types who eventually gave way to professional administrators. Writing fine, vivid prose, Lipartito and Butler wisely avoid concentrating on the hot-shot astronauts, focusing instead on the center itself and on the dedicated men and women behind the scenes who worked on the engineering required to lift a rocket out of Earth's gravity and made the American space program a success. 97 b&w illus. (Aug. 12)
