NASA was always a jobs program as well as what it ostensibly was for, it was officially tasked with industrially uplifting the South, which became an even bigger thing when LBJ became president. The area to the immediate northeast of MIT was still mostly a wasteland when I showed up in 1979 because NASA all of a sudden decided that Houston was the ideal place to put the Mission Control Center....

After Apollo, that became many times more what it was for.