The American spaceport and the power of cultural imaginaries

Cape Canaveral, the site of the American space programme launch complex located on the coast of Central Florida, has both a deep history in technological innovation and has been the place for architecturally imagining the new frontier of civilization. The range and trajectory of this new extraterrestrial frontier today resides within this once remote wilderness at the ends of architecture – both at the ends of a disciplinary formation and the physical site that enables the departure from Earth. Cultural imaginaries, collective forms created by culture, such as images relating to the assumed efficiencies of space exploration, construct a political desire for departing the Earth, yet rely heavily on architectural and infrastructural devices that are soon left abandoned on our terrestrial surface. This article moves from the geographic space of the late nineteenth century to the celebrated technological objects of NASA’s Apollo 11 programme for reaching the moon. By tracking the range, escape and return of the Apollo programmes’ constructed environment, the American spaceport reveals an invisible wilderness as an architectural aesthetic formed out of the cultural imagination in the early twenty-first century.