The Mississippi Test Facility

Engines, engines, engines.

On October 25th, 1961, NASA announced that the Mississippi Test Facility, now the John C. Stennis Space Center, would be built.

NASA needed an area that was far enough away from major population centers, while still having access to utilities and water transportation.

NASA found a suitable area in a part of Mississippi that bordered Louisiana along the Gulf Coast. There was just one problem. There were five small towns on the land that NASA would radically transform from small logging communities to a test facility tasked with checking out the engines that would send Apollo astronauts to the moon.

Pictured here in this NASA image is a first stage from the Saturn V rocket that underwent testing at the “B-2 stand at Stennis Space Center (then the Mississippi Test Facility) in March 1967.” Picture & caption credit- NASA.

Logtown, Gainesville, Santa Rosa, Napoleon, and Westonia and all of the inhabitants of those towns were moved to make way for the massive concrete and steel test stands required for engine testing.

Nearly 1,000 people relocated and the “786 residences, 16 churches, 19 stores, three schools and a wide assortment of commercial buildings, including nightclubs and community centers” were either moved or destroyed.

Mississippi Senator John C. Stennis, the man that the test facility was renamed for, urged the people that were being displaced by this project to understand that: “There is always the thorn before the rose; you have got to…