When did Brevard become the Space Coast?

Nobody voted to call Brevard the Space Coast. The name grew out of advertising. According to the State Archives of Florida’s exhibit on Florida and the Apollo program, “by the mid-1960s the term ‘space coast’ was being widely used by both realtors and advertisers” for the stretch of Florida’s Atlantic coast running roughly from Daytona Beach down to Fort Pierce. It was never only Brevard’s to begin with.

Before the Space Coast

The towns came to the space age one slogan at a time. The State Archives holds a brochure from about 1958 titled Welcome to Titusville, the Missile City. As the moon program grew, the exhibit says, public institutions took up the identity as eagerly as businesses did:

Place	Slogan
Titusville	”the Missile City” (brochure, about 1958)
Eau Gallie	”Gateway to the Space Program”
Melbourne	”Crossroads to the Universe”
Cocoa Beach	”Free World Space Center, U.S.A.”
Melbourne High School	”Education on the Threshold of Space”

Rockets, spacecraft and the moon went onto city seals and letterheads.

Official writing kept a plainer name. The 1966 study Florida State University did for NASA on the program’s effect on Brevard speaks of “the Cape Kennedy area,” after the name Cape Canaveral carried at the time.

Selling the launches

What made the name stick was tourism. At first, the State Archives notes, no visitors were allowed near the Cape. In 1963 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara began letting visitors drive through the Cape Canaveral area on Sunday afternoons. The next year Kennedy Space Center’s protocol office began tours of the Cape, including Launch Complexes 34 and 39, at first only for families of NASA workers and contractors; each of the first two drew more than 200 people. In 1965 NASA opened the tours to the public, and more than 1,900 came to the first one. By 1967 the count had passed a million, and NASA decided to build a visitor information center.

Chambers of commerce and promoters, the exhibit says, sold the best of both worlds: a week at the beach and the chance to see a rocket go up.

3-2-1

The nickname got a number in 1999. On December 29, 1998, the Florida Public Service Commission ordered the 407 area code split, with a new code, 321, replacing 407 in Brevard County. Callers could dial either from November 1, 1999, and 321 became mandatory on October 1, 2000.

The digits weren’t an accident. Spectrum News 13 reported that Ozzie Osband, a Titusville data programmer and admitted space geek, heard a launch countdown in the digits and asked the commissioners for 321 at a 1998 hearing in Orlando. On November 1, 1999, according to the same report, Governor Jeb Bush made the first call on the new code, to Kennedy Space Center.

Not all of Brevard got it. About 6,605 subscribers around Micco and Barefoot Bay, at the county’s southern tip, were served from BellSouth’s Sebastian exchange on the 561 code. The commission had them vote on moving into 321 with the rest of the county: 3,608 of 6,100 ballots came back, 1,713 in favor and 1,833 against, and in October 1999 it ordered no change.

Further Reading

• Live from Cape Canaveral: Covering the Space Race by Jay Barbree
• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe