Space City blues (Story)
By Andrew Curry with Fawn Germer
U.S. News & World Report, 02/17/2003

Section: Special Report: The Columbia Tragedy
Subsection: Letter from Titusville

Full Text: (Titusville) TITUSVILLE, FLA.--There isn't a place in America more closely tied to the space program than this town of 40,670. Before a shuttle launch, tourists flock to the beaches and causeways that line the placid Indian River between here and Cape Canaveral, pulling their cars off Route 1 onto the narrow spits of sand and pointing their binoculars east toward Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39. "No vacancy" signs sprout outside motels like the Best Western Space Shuttle Inn. And then the tourists are joined by thousands of locals, whose livelihoods depend on the shuttle, to watch their bread and butter roar into space.

Landings have their own unique rhythm. Residents and visitors alike have come to expect the distinctive double-barreled shotgun boom of a returning shuttle hurtling toward the 2.84-mile runway faster than the speed of sound.

So for Titusville, the silence on February 1 was deafening. Residents soon filled the quiet with expressions of grief; billboards were changed to read "God Bless Columbia."

Lifeblood. Almost as quickly came concern for the future. Fifteen thousand workers here draw paychecks from NASA or its contractors--and 38,000 are directly or indirectly employed in Brevard County's tourism industry. "It brings Challenger back like it was yesterday," says Jean Wood, who has lived in the area for 25 years, recalling the layoffs that followed the last shuttle disaster in January 1986. "Nobody knows what is going to happen in a town this size."

Everyone's hoping the future doesn't look like the past. After the Challenger exploded, launches were suspended for almost three years. The local economy went into a tailspin, with unemployment in the county reaching 7.3 percent in October 1986. "In '86 we had all of our eggs in one basket," says the Space Coast Office of Tourism's Bonnie King. Officials here have worked hard to diversify in the years since, emphasizing ecotourism (the Space Center sits in the middle of a massive wildlife preserve) and the cruise industry. "Still," King says, "lots of business here has to do with the space industry."

Eleven miles away, due east down State Road 405, sits the area's No. 1 tourist destination: the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. In a good year, the center sells almost 2 million tickets. Early last week, the facility was nearly empty. At the center's Astronaut Memorial, mourners laying flowers were nearly outnumbered by reporters and news crews. For workers there, the future was as cloudy as the sky above was blue. "Beaches and the Space Center--that's the reason people come to the Space Coast," says Dan LeBlanc, the Visitor Complex's chief operating officer. "We're all waiting to see what happens."