The T-38 Flight Line

NASA's astronauts keep their flying skills sharp at Ellington Field, where the Johnson Space Center has based its aircraft since 1962. That year the Manned Spacecraft Center set up its own Aircraft Operations Division under Joseph Algranti to handle all astronaut flight training. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts logged thousands of hours in T-38 Talon trainers, two-seat jets good for Mach 1.2 and 50,000 feet, and astronauts still fly them from Ellington. The field itself dates to 1917, when the Army bought 1,280 acres near Genoa and named the base for Lieutenant Eric Ellington, an aviator killed four years earlier. By 1967 it was the site of the Apollo lunar landing training program, and in the early 1960s Manned Spacecraft Center staff worked out of its empty barracks while the Clear Lake campus was built.

Ellington is where Houston met its astronauts coming home. The Apollo 11 crew landed there at about two in the morning on 27 July 1969, sealed in their quarantine trailer, and in mid-August, once it was out of quarantine, their command module was loaded onto a Super Guppy at Ellington for the trip to California. On 4 July 1982 the shuttle Challenger stopped over on the back of NASA's 747 carrier, crewed onward by Algranti and Dick Scobee, who would die commanding Challenger in 1986. Shuttle crews came home to welcome ceremonies in NASA's Ellington hangar, the last of them after STS-135 in July 2011.

The city's airport system has run the field since 1984, and on 30 June 2015 the FAA licensed it as the Houston Spaceport, the tenth commercial spaceport in the country, for vehicles that take off and land like aircraft.