Lyndon Johnson’s leadership in space policy predates Kennedy’s presidency. As majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Johnson was instrumental in passing the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which in turn led to the creation of NASA. In 1961, President Kennedy made Vice President Johnson head of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, charged with exploring the feasibility of landing a man on the moon within the decade.

Rep. Albert Thomas was a 1926 graduate of the UT School of Law. On November 21, 1963, President Kennedy addressed an appreciation dinner for Thomas in Houston. “The United States next month will have a leadership in space which it wouldn’t have without Albert Thomas. And so will this city,” Kennedy said. The following day Thomas joined the president’s entourage for its fateful trip to Dallas.

By 1964, the university was using cutting-edge radio telescope research to try to identify suitable landing sites, as a radio telescope could view subsurface features as well as surface. The work was done in a partnership between NASA and UT’s Department of Electrical Engineering. The telescope was shipped from Austin to Palo Alto, Calif.

Witnessing History, Inspiring the Future

There, in the Bay Area, Hans Mark became director of NASA’s Ames Research Center in February 1969. Mark later would become UT System chancellor and a member of UT’s aerospace engineering program. “My wife and I had been invited to Houston for the [the moon landing],” Mark recalled in his 1987 book “The Space Station,” “because, as a newly minted NASA center director, I rated such an invitation.…” He continues:

“I had the good fortune to be in the Mission Control Center at the manned spacecraft center on the day of the landing and it was clearly one of the high moments of my life . . . The climax, of course, was Armstrong’s first step on the moon. . . in the early morning hours (Houston time) we sat in the viewing room behind the Mission Control Center watching the flickering television repeater to see Armstrong’s historic step on the lunar surface. After the first step, I remember staying on for an hour or two to watch some of the other things that might occur. . . The few hours I spent at the MCC on that day were not to be equaled until a dozen years later when I watched the space shuttle Columbia’s first takeoff from the same place.”