Seamans had gotten his doctorate at the institute and been an associate professor there (he would later serve as Air Force secretary and return to MIT as dean of engineering) Bisplinghoff had been a professor and Kelley was a Boston native who had also gotten his doctorate at MIT. Three of Webb's top advisors-Associate Administrator Robert Seamans Raymond Bisplinghoff, director of NASA's Office of Advanced Research and Technology and Director of Electronics and Control Albert Kelley - had direct ties to MIT. "NASA's fundamental dependence on electronics and its need for internal expertise drove the agency to create an entirely new center, the Electronics Research Center," a NASA-commissioned historical paper noted.Īs the paper continued, "it is not clear how the Boston area was chosen, or even if NASA considered other locations." However, the long work MIT had done to bolster its ties to the military and other branches of the government served it well. In concert with the restructuring, NASA administrator James Webb and other key officials believed the agency needed to dramatically up its electronics game. The mission sparked a reorganization of NASA to focus on the manned space imitative. Kennedy had declared to Congress that the United States should set the goal "of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" before the decade was out. In May 1961, barely four months into his presidency, John F. NASA had been established the following year. Russia had launched its Sputnik satellite in 1957, shocking the United States with its technological prowess. The space race was in full bloom in the early 1960s. Had it done so, Kendall Square might be on a dramatically different trajectory than it is today. And what few likely realize is that the center never came close to reaching the size and scope it was supposed to have achieved. It was given the axe under the Nixon administration, though, not by Lyndon Johnson. The ERC opened in September 1964 and was closed less than six years later on June 30, 1970. Rather, it was chosen to host the space agency's Electronics Research Center (ERC), which was built. Kendall Square was never supposed to have been NASA headquarters. But it misstates what really happened in important ways. That makes for a nice, neat story-and there is some truth in it. The site was built, NASA moved in, but then, after Kennedy's assassination, new president Lyndon Johnson moved it to his native Texas, where it remains today. Kennedy serving as president of the United States, he arranged for it to be in Kendall Square. The most common version of the myth runs something like this: The space agency needed a headquarters, and with Massachusetts's own John F. People shake their heads and point to the eye-sore compound with a gigantic tower building opposite the Marriott Hotel between Broadway and Binney Street. The story of NASA in Kendall Square would be told and retold countless times by locals-even more than fifty years later. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Excerpted from " Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub" by Robert Buderi.
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