Space Rockets in Rockport: The Texas Coast That Almost Launched America

In 1946, the U.S. government looked at a barrier island off the Texas Gulf Coast and almost made it the national launch site. Cape Canaveral got it instead — by a matter of degrees of latitude. Thirty-six years later, the first privately funded rocket in American history lifted off from that same island. This episode traces the hidden aerospace history of a fifty-mile stretch of Gulf Coast shoreline: the Naval Air Station at Corpus Christi that trained Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, the Cold War radar station four miles from Lamar that went to high alert during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Conestoga 1 launch on September 9, 1982 — the day Deke Slayton, Mercury 7 astronaut, helped make commercial spaceflight real. The man who owned the island died that morning and never saw it.

Available August 14, 2026