Cape Kennedy and back, 1963 to 1973

For ten years Cape Canaveral was officially Cape Kennedy. On November 28, 1963, six days after President Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson announced that Cape Canaveral would be renamed in his memory, according to NASA’s Spaceport News. The next day he signed Executive Order 11129, naming the space facilities on and near the cape the John F. Kennedy Space Center. The cape got its old name back in 1973. The space center did not.

Six days before Dallas

Kennedy’s last trip to the cape was on November 16, 1963, his third visit in 21 months. NASA’s history Moonport records the day. James Webb, Kurt Debus and Maj. Gen. Leighton Davis met his Boeing 707, he was briefed on the Saturn program at Launch Complex 37, and he flew by helicopter with Debus to view Merritt Island, then out over the coast to watch a Polaris missile fired from the submarine Andrew Jackson. A week later he was killed in Dallas.

The order

Executive Order 11129, dated November 29, 1963, did not mention the cape itself. It designated “the facilities of the Launch Operations Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the facilities of Station No. 1 of the Atlantic Missile Range, in the State of Florida, as the John F. Kennedy Space Center.” The order explained why: Kennedy “lighted the imagination of our people when he set the moon as our target and man as the means to reach it.”

Three new names

NASA’s Launch Operations Center became the John F. Kennedy Space Center, NASA, effective December 20, 1963, Spaceport News says. The Air Force followed: its launch area, the Cape Canaveral Missile Test Annex, became Cape Kennedy Air Force Station, in January 1964 according to the Space Force’s heritage history. NASA’s new land on Merritt Island, first called the Merritt Island Launch Area, took the Kennedy Space Center name in 1964, the heritage history says. And the cape itself was now Cape Kennedy. The range changed names in 1964 too, from the Atlantic Missile Range to the Eastern Test Range, though not for Kennedy.

Johnson had Florida’s governor, Farris Bryant, behind him on renaming the cape, Moonport notes, and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names accepted Cape Kennedy the following year.

Why did Cape Kennedy go back to Cape Canaveral?

Because the name was centuries old. NASA’s own 2002 history of the name says maps from five or six centuries ago called the point the “Cape of Currents,” for its dangerous coastline, and it credits the name Canaveral to Ponce de León. Translations vary, but they all describe a place of canes. Moonport calls it “one of the oldest place-names in the country, dating back to the earliest days of Spanish exploration.” Trading that for a week-old memorial struck many in Brevard as, in Moonport’s words, “a mistaken gesture.”

Getting it back

Floridians never took to it. Many in Brevard thought it a mistake to change one of the oldest place names in the country, NASA’s 1978 history Moonport says, and after a debate in its town council the City of Cape Canaveral declined to change its own name. Residents campaigned for ten years to get the cape’s name back, Spaceport News records. Efforts in Congress failed, and in May 1973 Governor Reubin Askew signed a state law restoring Cape Canaveral on all State of Florida documents and maps; Spaceport News dates the signing May 18, Moonport May 29. On October 9, 1973, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names restored the name for federal use. The Air Force station followed on April 1, 1974, when it became Cape Canaveral Air Force Station; since December 9, 2020, it has been Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Why the space center kept Kennedy’s name

Moonport says people at the cape seemed to approve of the spaceport carrying his name, and that until then NASA’s launch center had only a descriptive one. Debus, its first director, wrote that the change came by executive order “but to me it is also fitting recognition to his personal and intense involvement in the National Space Program.” Charles Buckley, the center’s security chief at the time, told Spaceport News in 2002 he’d been “very happy” about it: “It was because of President Kennedy that we were here working to put a man on the Moon.”

The Kennedy name stayed on the NASA center on Merritt Island, which is why the two neighbors carry different names today. The station’s other name changes are on our proving-ground page.

Further Reading

• Live from Cape Canaveral by Jay Barbree