History
The site was ready for coverage of the first launch from KSC, the unmanned Apollo 4 flight on November 9, 1967, for which NASA received 510 requests for news media accreditation. The sound of this first Saturn V liftoff was sufficiently powerful at the Press Site to prompt CBS-TV anchor Walter Cronkite to exclaim, "Our building's shaking here...the floor is shaking...this big glass window is shaking, we're holding it with our hands!" A ceiling tile or two were shaken loose above his head.
During the Apollo program, the NASA news center was located in Cocoa Beach. To provide on-site public affairs offices, a Charter-Sphere dome from the Third Century America exhibition near the VAB during the United States Bicentennial in 1976 was later moved to the mound. In 1983, it was replaced by a larger dome; and a permanent building, the current KSC News Center, replaced that dome in December 1995.
During the first decade of Space Shuttle launches, NASA contractors provided reference materials to the media from the Joint Industry Press Center (JIPC, pronounced "gypsy"), housed in a semi-permanent trailer located near a large covered grandstand facing the two launch pads.
The grandstand, built in 1967, was torn down following damage from Hurricane Frances in September 2004. Several media trailers and buildings on the mound were also damaged, and were either removed or replaced with prefabricated structures.
Read more about this topic: Launch Complex 39 Press Site
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)