![]() ![]() Left: The sign in front of the Farnsworth & Chambers Building, with Manned Spacecraft Center Director Robert R. Right: A NASA meatball logo and other historical artifacts are displayed in the building’s lobby. Middle: The building today is the headquarters of the Houston Parks and Recreation Department. Wayside Drive served as temporary headquarters for the Manned Spacecraft Center. Left: The Farnsworth & Chambers Building (Site 2) at 2999 S. Map of southeast Houston showing the locations of the temporary sites used by NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center while the Clear Lake center (Site 1) was under construction. Most of the buildings are still standing today, repurposed over the years to various public and private uses, lesser known reminders to the earliest days of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. 1, 1961, was spread out over 13 separate buildings, some housing as few as 46 employees, the largest 389. The Manned Spacecraft Center, officially open for business in Houston on Nov. Between December 1961 and July 1962, when the transfers were completed, about 750 employees relocated to Houston, and the workforce kept increasing after that. Over the next few months, the need to house an ever-expanding work force led NASA to lease temporary space in more than a dozen facilities in the southeast part of Houston. Their next tasks included finding adequate office and laboratory space for lease to handle the wave of engineers relocating to begin work in Houston, with the main site on Clear Lake still on the drawing board. 2, 1961, secured temporary offices in the Gulfgate Shopping City located on the Gulf Freeway about five miles southeast of downtown. Right: The Gulfgate sign is what remains of the original shopping center torn down in 2001 to make way for a new strip shopping mall.Ī NASA advance team arrived in Houston and on Oct. The Gulf Freeway runs along the bottom of the image, while the 610 Loop Freeway at top exists only as feeder roads that end at the shopping center. ![]() Left: The Gulfgate Shopping City in the early 1960s, where the Manned Spacecraft Center first opened temporary offices. Once the employees moved onto the Clear Lake site, an open house in June 1964 allowed the public to see the activities of the Manned Spacecraft Center. Many of those buildings still stand, permanent testimony to the early history of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. While architects designed and construction workers built the main center in Clear Lake, by June 1962 NASA employees settled into 13 temporary facilities throughout southeast Houston. By early October, a NASA advance team secured temporary office space to begin the transition from NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. 19, 1961 announcement that NASA had selected Houston as the site of the new Manned Spacecraft Center, work began almost immediately to find temporary office space for the hundreds of workers while the facility was built. ![]()
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