It didn’t take long for Corpus Christi’s tie to the space program to grow beyond the fact that future astronauts including John Glenn, Alan Shepard and Neil Armstrong had taken to the skies over the area during U.S. Navy pilot training.
On the land that served as Rodd Field, an auxiliary landing field for NAS-CC during WWII, NASA built Manned Space Flight Tracking Station No. 16 in 1961. The station began as a site to monitor Project Mercury, which provided many of the “firsts” of space travel including the first manned suborbital flight and first American in space (Shepard), and the first man in orbit (Glenn).
The station grew during Projects Gemini and Apollo, employing about 130 people at its peak. From “TEX,” staff monitored telemetry data, checked the health of the astronauts and tracked data collection from experiments onboard, and after a 1965 equipment upgrade, held two-way telephone-quality conversations with astronauts aboard the spacecraft. The equipment here made possible the first live television transmission from space, aboard Apollo 7 in 1968.
In 1969, NASA’s equipment was so sensitive that the data read in Corpus Christi showed the vibration of the Apollo 11 astronaut’s footsteps as they walked on the moon. But as manned flights to space became more regular, monitoring needs grew and TEX was closed in 1974 after the return of Skylab 3. Presented to the City of Corpus Christi by the federal government, the land went on to become Bill Witt Park.
