<font face
Dr. Kurt H. Debus the father of NASA's Kennedy Space Center
was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1908.
His education and rocketry experience landed him in the post-World War II
ballistic missile systems development program in the U.S.
Along with about 100 German colleagues, he worked first at Fort Bliss, Texas,
before relocating to Huntsville, Alabama.
Debus came to the Cape in the early 1950s to set up a launch site,
and permanently moved to the area with his family by the middle of the decade.
On July 1, 1962, the Florida launch facility at Cape Canaveral was officially
designated as NASA's Launch Operations Center, and Debus was named
its first center director.
The following year, the center was renamed to honor President John F. Kennedy
just after his assassination.
By that time, construction of the spaceport under Debus' leadership
was well under way as the launch pads and the Vehicle Assembly Building
rose on what had been coastal wilderness.
Amid the flurry of building facilities and developing rockets,
Debus had the forethought to help establish what would become
the 140,000-acre Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge.
By the time Debus retired as center director in 1974,
the list of human space achievements under his leadership represented
some of the greatest in U.S. history. Among them were:
Sending the first American, Alan Sheppard, into space
Launching John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth
And the first lunar landing, when Neil Armstrong became
the first man on the moon
The accomplishments achieved under his leadership are still astonishing
from early rocket testing to man's first footprint on the moon.
Today the developments Debus helped mastermind in both facilities and rocketry
live on at the Kennedy Space Center, helping to usher in NASA's new goals
to go back to the moon, then travel on to Mars and beyond.