Looking back 50 years at the Kennedy Space Center (pictures)

NASA's landmark facility on the Florida coast has been sending rockets and astronauts into space for a half-century. We take a look back at some of the early missions.John Kennedy was a Navy man, a New Englander with a penchant for the sea, but as president of the United States, he brought impetus and a distinctive eloquence to the space race that defined a generation and vaulted American astronauts into the heavens. "This nation," he said in a famed speech in May 1961, "should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

And for the last half-century, his name has been affixed to the vast enterprise at the heart of America's many voyages into space, NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The space agency notes that it was 50 years ago this week, on July 1, 1962, that the launch facility at Cape Canaveral in Florida took on full-fledged center status, no longer under the auspices of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

Here we see President Kennedy (wearing sunglasses) gazing skyward in the company of Wernher von Braun, the expatriate German scientist who was critical to the early development of the U.S. rocket program, during a trip to Cape Canaveral's Launch Complex 37 on November 16, 1963. [Read more]