TITUSVILLE, Fla. — There’s a sense of a re-birth in Brevard County which is home to Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center.
From its first Apollo mission to its last shuttle landing, space exploration had its highs and lows.
“I am hopeful the history continues to be told,” Brenda Mulberry said.
She is the owner of Space Shirts, a Merritt Island business that sells space novelties. For 36 years, she’s had a front-row seat to the launches and felt their impact, literally.
“We are so close we feel the movement on every launch," Mulberry said. "What I mean, physically, is not just the building shakes, but we get to talk to the crews. We get to talk with the scientists with the experiments.”
When the shuttle missions ended in 2011, she began to see the impacts in other ways.
Layoffs totaled more than 9,000 and many were NASA contractors.
The county’s unemployment rate increased to almost 12% and the Space Coast, at one point, had the highest home foreclosure rate in the country.
“It was a huge drop off for us,” Clay Townsend said.
He is the owner of Dixie Crossroads, a restaurant in Titusville that has weathered many storms in its 37 years.
Townsend saw a sales decline of nearly 25% after the shuttle program ended.
He says it’s taken about eight years to fully recover. Thankfully he never had to close, until the coronavirus earlier this year forced his hand.
“It was a slow climb back as they started bringing in more of these independent contractors and rockets," Townsend said. "They would bring in smaller groups of people as they were building their companies.”
Reminders of how important the space program is to Townsend hang on the walls of his restaurant with pictures of astronauts paying homage to the history of the space program.
Mulberry, who’s from the First Coast, shares similar sentiments. She’s printed t-shirts commemorating every shuttle launch between 1988 and 2011.
She even printed t-shirts ahead of the Space-X launch – marking the next chapter for space flight and Brevard County.
“I love where I live now," she said. "This is the best place on Earth."