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A comment on Elon Musk: 'Europe's rocket has no chance'. Parent comment

Re:Elon Musk: 'Europe's rocket has no chance' by bathat on Monday November 19, 2012 @09:22PM (#4807440)
I'm sure it's mentioned in Moon Shot[1]. Most books about the space race mention it. Houston was just one of several proposed locations which met NASA's official specifications for a mission control site.

One of those specifications was the minimum distance between mission control and the launch site. That specification was revised upward so that it just barely excluded the then-leading site after Rice University agreed to donate the land. It doesn't take a Von Braun to figure out what happened.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Shot

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Re:Elon Musk: 'Europe's rocket has no chance' by shardling on Tuesday November 20, 2012 @08:53PM (#4812383)
That's completely different than what the other poster (Symmetry) claimed -- that they otherwise would have been in the same location.

That politics plays into the decision making process of which site to use isn't too shocking, but Symmetry was claiming that the very creation of that site was political.

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