Florida's Space Coast: The Impact of NASA on the Sunshine State Book

Faherty gives a wonderful historical overview of the Space Coast and how NASA and the Kennedy Space Center affected the area and its residents. I found the early history covering the 1950s/60s most interesting.

My only beef with this book is that the author glossed over the financial impact that the Apollo program had when it was canceled. He mentions layoffs in about one or two sentences, and then talks about how the population wasn't affected and sort of moves on from there. As someone who was living there at the time, I was disappointed that he didn't mention the reason the population didn't change - in size - was due to the fact that retired Northerners were coming down here and buying the homes of ex-employees who couldn't afford them any more. So, the retirees were basically replacing the ex-employees who eventually had to leave the area in order to find work. Considering you could drive down any subdivision in the area at the time and see a "for sale" sign on almost every house, this fact should have been addressed much more. It gave me the feeling that he didn't want to put NASA in a bad light.