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Ground Control: A Design History of Technical Lands and NASA’s Space Complex by Jeffrey S. Nesbit | Routledge | $39.19
The morning of June 17, 1985 was just like any other humid morning on the Florida coast. It was just around sunrise, and from my parents’ car, I could see watery marshes reflecting the clouds aflame in blooms of pink, orange, and magenta. The air was thick, and through it I saw other cars, a long line of them, stretching into the distance, all pointed in the same direction to a point somewhere faraway. I stood up on the car roof to get a better look at the other visitors. Some had binoculars, many had cameras. So did I, and shortly before 7 a.m., I mounted my father’s 35mm Nikkormat to a small reflecting telescope. The car roof was slippery with condensation, but once I got some more secure footing, I made some quick calibrations on the camera rangefinder before focusing on the bronze, ogive-shaped external fuel tank belonging to the Space Shuttle Discovery. Even with my relatively powerful telescope, the spacecraft seemed small. And yet there it was: black leading-edged, delta-winged, and snub-nosed, poised for yet another jaunt into low Earth orbit. The world was still and quiet in these final moments. I stared at the morning sky reflected on the marshes, at the grasses rustling in a gentle breeze, and heard the countdown echoing in the distance when suddenly the air seemed to be torn apart with a terrific, guttural report. In those few seconds, I panned the telescope and snapped a handful of images of Discovery ascending into the sky on top of a curving column of fire and smoke. It was 7:33 a.m.
I was born in the aphelion of the Nixon administration. I am old enough to say my earliest heroes were people like Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and “Buzz” Aldrin. I had been to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center eight years earlier, in 1977, where my parents bought me all the Apollo, Gemini, Mercury, and SkyLab mission patches. We toured the mammoth Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) with its giant star commemorating the United States Bicentennial, saw some rockets, ate in a cafeteria, tried on space helmets. Nothing was even remotely as cool as the Lunar Excursion Module simulator that gave kids like me a chance to peer through a triangular window and see the surface of the moon from an Apollo astronaut’s point-of-view.
In 1984, I continued this nerdy trajectory when my parents moved to Seabrook, Texas, not far from the Johnson Space Center. I bought Space Shuttle mission patches. I even got to sit in a chair from a Gemini capsule. I went to nearby Clear Lake High School, and taking the bus to and from there, I will always remember our route along Space Center Boulevard, which curved along the eastern edges of the Johnson Space Center, seeing astronauts of all stripes jogging or playing softball.
For the architect and educator Jeffrey S. Nesbit, these landscapes, buildings, artifacts, and purviews that played such a huge part in my upbringing are “technical lands.” The term is one that Nesbit and urbanist Charles Waldheim have explored in their edited volume from 2023, Technical Lands: A Critical Primer to describe spaces “united by their ‘exceptional’ status—their remote location, delimited boundary, secured accessibility, and vigilant management.” “Technical lands” is a more or less critical armature applicable to spaces such as proving grounds, research facilities, or even landscapes that are appropriated, sequestered, and hidden in the name of scientific and political agendas. Whether as a catch-all term that incorporates objects of various scales, from the industrial object to infrastructure, or even as a spatial category, technical lands had yet to receive any kind of sustained monographic inquiry—until now. In Ground Control: A Design History of Technical Lands and NASA’s Space Complex, Nesbit continues the agendas from his 2023 volume to provide a nuanced analysis of the buildings and landscapes at the Kennedy and Johnson Space Centers. More specifically, or at least, according to Nesbit’s own calculus, it is an “infrastructural history of the U.S. rocket launch complex.”
Nesbit presents a compelling case for a thorough architectural analysis of NASA’s primary human spaceflight facilities in a series of concise chapters. These chapters are enriched with his personal photographs from visits to the Space Centers, as well as archival materials and period ephemera. Drawing upon an extensive visual archive from the Historical American Buildings Survey and newly declassified documents, Nesbit illustrates how a potent blend of Kennan-inspired geopolitics and Eisenhower-era pragmatism shaped the design and construction of America’s spaceflight complexes.
His work clearly reflects an affinity for previous scholarship at the intersection of architectural history and theory and history of science. In this vein, Ground Control weaves concepts from an enviable roster of works, from Keller Easterling’s theoretical explorations of infrastructure in Organization Space (1999), to Paul Virilio’s writings on the militarization of vision in War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1986). Other writings by historian Felicity Scott and architect Fred Scharmen on the utopian and architectural ambitions of Gerard O’Neill and NASA’s Space Settlements program were clearly referenced (featured in the recent Emerging Ecologies show at the Museum of Modern Art.) And finally, Jean-Louis Cohen’s 2011 work, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War, and its claim that war “disciplined” architectural modernism, emerges as the most frequently cited reference in this discourse. Together, these works illuminate the complex interplay between architectural thought, scientific advancement, and military-industrial spatial organization that shaped the “Space Complex,” a catchall term that describes NASA’s spaceflight architectures.
When sifting through the layered references and armatures that propel Ground Control along its theoretical itineraries, it’s worth noting that the book is about much more than the Space Complex. Sure, there are blockhouses, bunkers, towers, and office buildings that tell a story of how NASA’s land acquisitions resulted in a new infrastructural type—a Spaceport—for connecting Earth to outer space. As Nesbit writes, Ground Control “turns its lens back towards the range of scales—from the interior semi-buried objects to the occupation of vast and remote reaches across the globe.” His spaces of inquiry—the Space Center control rooms, highways, spacecraft assembly facilities, and administrative centers—are ordinary enough to escape the discerning eye of one expecting a flirtation with normative histories of aesthetics or styles. Nesbit never lets readers forget that NASA’s architecture is ubiquitous, but not generic. In other words, and despite HABS’s description of NASA’s administrative facilities as examples of International Style, this is a book where the buildings and structures are nameless and faceless. Without pedigree or distinction, the architecture of these complexes have had an outsized impact in the way the United States fashioned its self-image in the postwar world.
It’s a bit of a paradox. What kind of history does Ground Control tell? The book’s title suggests that it is a “design history,” a term that echoes the way Cohen’s Architecture in Uniform focused on “designing and building,” and not just architecture. Nesbit critiques NASA’s land consumption practices in Florida and Texas. Indeed, Nisbet and Waldheim have argued previously that the identification of “technical lands” is a political act in itself. And yet there is an uneasy case of Stockholm Syndrome here, for despite these critical readings of NASA’s facilities as technical lands, the methods employed by Nesbit in this book are doing the same thing—expanding and neutralizing an entire realm of inquiry under the banner of a theoretical category.
As interesting as this can be, it leads to some historical blind spots. By limiting its inquiry to NASA’s Space Centers, Ground Control overlooks spaces that have arguably contributed to the Space Complex. Buildings and facilities such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California; the testing facilities at Edwards Air Force Base; and the Full-Scale Wind Tunnel at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (built by NASA’s precursor, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, or NACA) are crucial players in any history of the U.S. Space Programs.
There are other moments throughout the book sure to raise a historian’s hackles. Nisbet’s emphasis on the ubiquity and uniformity of NASA’s architectures rightly mentions the role played by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). But there are no substantive investigations on how USACE culture contributed to formation of “technical lands,” a theme that is central to Architecture in Uniform as well as Todd Shallat’s Structures in the Stream: Water, Science, and the Rise of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (2010). Nisbet also ventures into some overreaching claims about modern architecture. This becomes especially evident when he discusses enclosures at the Space Centers along Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center (1956) Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851), and even Gerard O’Neill’s Space Settlements. By inverting cultural historian Leo Marx’s concept of the “Machine in the Garden” into a “Garden in the Machine,” Nesbit claims that the Space Centers constituted a new garden typology, a “synthetic environment situated between terrestrial wilderness and extraterrestrial imagination.” This is a very promising argument, one that would have benefited from more discussions about the material culture of NASA’s Space Centers. Instead, it is abandoned for discussions about representation and visuality.
This is certainly important, but it relies on a kind of unbalanced optic, as evidenced in the book’s final chapter. There, Nisbet reveals fascinating details about the terraforming needed to build the paved roads used by the crawler-transporters ferrying rockets from the VAB to the launchpads. This becomes yet another instance of “an infrastructure producing images of wasteland for departing Earth.” But it overlooks the roads’ inability to withstand the crawler-transporters’ immense weight. This problem led to expensive repaving every three years, steering NASA engineers to an innovative solution: to cover the asphalt with Alabama river rock, which would be crushed into a smooth surface with every journey of the crawler-transporters.
Ground Control is also marred by missing footnotes (including a very significant one that was supposed to reference Architecture in Uniform in chapter 5) and some image citations that are wanting more explanation. Also missing from this book is any discussion of NASA’s future Manned Spacecraft Center as a vital part of exurban development in the Houston areas. Adam Higginbotham makes such a point in Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space (2024), reminding readers that the location of the Johnson Space Center had as much to do with NASA’s aspirations as it did with its proximity to Congressional districts home to important appropriations committee members, and to the planning and design of Clear Lake City.
Ground Control begins at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Base on July 24, 1950, with the launch of Bumper 8, a hybrid rocket made of pieces from a WAC Corporal missile and a propulsion stage from a captured and reconfigured Nazi V2 rocket. It is an auspicious beginning for the book as this launch ties America’s entry into outer space with Wernher von Braun’s continuation of his World War II–era work at Fort Bliss, Texas, and Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, which spurred the development of ICBMs and the headlong drift towards global nuclear war. I also remembered that morning in 1985 when I photographed the launch of shuttle Discovery from a vantage point not far from the site of Bumper 8’s ascent. But as a writer, historian, and critic, I could help but think of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), a book that begins and ends with the launch of a V2 rocket. The rocket becomes a cipher for modernity and a talisman that conjures a dark vision of military technologies as fetish objects. I wonder if the technical lands of Kennedy and Johnson Space Centers are operating on a similar register. Does the design culture at NASA have a metonymic relationship to larger patterns of institutionally sponsored land-use practices? With every moment spent poring over Ground Control, the more I realized that the design, construction, and development of the Kennedy and Johnson Space Centers are more space oddity than space complex.
Enrique Ramirez is a historian of art and architecture. He lives in Brooklyn.