Seabrook, Nassau Bay & the Astronaut Suburbs

In 1961 the nation set out for the moon, and it chose a stretch of Texas ranch land and rice prairie beside Clear Lake to do the work. Almost overnight the Manned Spacecraft Center — later renamed for Lyndon Johnson — sprouted here, and quiet bay-area subdivisions like Timber Cove, El Lago, and Nassau Bay filled up with astronauts, engineers, and flight controllers. This drive threads the space city together with the older coast it landed on: the mission control rooms where flights were flown, the giant chamber where spacecraft were tested against the vacuum, the museum that now welcomes the public, and the neighborhoods where four of the original Mercury astronauts became next-door neighbors. Along the way you'll pass the plantation land and prehistoric shell mounds that were here for centuries before the rockets — because the space age landed on a coast that already had a very long story.