History
The complex had its beginning in the 1960s in a small trailer containing simple displays on card tables. By 1964, more than 250,000 self-guided car tours, permitted between 1 and 4 p.m. ET on Sundays at the urging of U.S. Rep. Olin Teague of Texas, were seen at KSC. In 1965, KSC Director Kurt H. Debus was authorized to spend $2 million on a full-scale visitors center. Spaceport USA, as it was soon titled, hosted 500,000 visitors in 1967, its first year, and one million by 1969. Even during the gap between the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs, attendance remained at over one million guests and it ranked as the fifth most popular tourist attraction in Florida.
When nearby Walt Disney World opened in 1971, visitors center attendance increased by 30 percent, but the public was often disappointed by the comparative lack of polish at KSC's tourist facilities. Existing displays were largely made up of trade show exhibits donated by NASA contractors. Later that year, a $2.3 million upgrade of the visitor complex was begun with added focus on the benefits of space exploration along with the existing focus on human space exploration.
In 1995, Delaware North Companies was selected to operate the visitor center. Since then, the facility has been entirely self-supporting and receives no taxpayer or government funding. NASA renewed the contract with Delaware North Companies through May 2020 with options to extend the contract through 2030.
Read more about this topic: Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“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)