HOUSTON -- The astronauts are everywhere you look, painted on walls or hovering in billboards. Astronauts in cowboy hats and astronauts with beers. Astronauts holding hamburgers or dunking basketballs.
Houston’s identity as a hub of space exploration -- the place where Apollo 13 astronauts once called to tell NASA’s mission control that they had “a problem” -- can sometimes seem to be little more than a kind of kitschy nostalgia, mixed with a bit of municipal self-branding.
Then real astronauts took off Wednesday, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Control of their flight passed to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in southeast Houston. Suddenly, the metropolis that calls itself “Space City” was back at the center of an American mission to send people around the moon.
“Houston is a city that was built on space,” said Sen. Ted Cruz in an interview after the launch. “It is not an accident that one of the very first words uttered on the lunar surface was Houston: ‘Houston, the Eagle has landed,’” he added, referring to words spoken by Neil Armstrong to mission control after landing on the moon in 1969.
By then, the city had its space-themed baseball team, the Astros, playing in their space-age stadium, the Astrodome, to go along with astronauts living near and training at what was then the Manned Spacecraft Center. (The center was built in the city after effective political maneuvering by Johnson, a native Texan, and renamed for him in 1973.)
“For Houston, it was personal,” said Coco Brennan, 68, recalling the feeling of growing up during the 1960s space race in the city, as she waited to watch Wednesday’s launch at the museum attached to the NASA campus. “It was like someone we knew was up there.”
The emotional connection to the launch stretched far beyond Houston as Americans again, young and old, alone or in families or with groups of strangers, took a moment to thrill and wonder at the power of a rocket flying off Earth’s surface. Children sat rapt in front of televisions. Adults cried.
At the museum, known as Space Center Houston, more than 1,000 people waved small American flags and watched the countdown together on a giant screen amid exhibits of past space journeys.
As the numbers ticked down to zero, cheers grew louder. Then, as the engines shuddered and flames emerged, the cheers grew into an almost primal cry of excitement and joy.
“I got a little teary-eyed,” said Nick Huntsman, 24, who lives near the space center, where his fiance works. “I don’t feel very proud of my country lately, but for this, I do. We still got things going for us.”
“It’s about all of us together,” said Patrick McAvoy, 36, who drove from St. Louis with his family, including his 14-month-old daughter.
Cruz said he held his breath and said a prayer as he watched on his phone while in a car riding through Houston, “because there’s always inherent risk in any space launch.”
Once the astronauts were safely on their way, he texted congratulations to the NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman.
“The connection of Texas and the commitment of Texas to space is enormous,” Cruz said.
The launch of the Artemis II mission Wednesday was a reminder not only of the role that Houston has long played as the home of the NASA campus and mission control but also of the growing private space industry that has taken off across Texas.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX launches its giant moon and Mars rocket prototypes regularly near Brownsville in the state’s southern tip. Blue Origin has tested technologies for spaceflight and flew space tourists on suborbital flights in West Texas. Firefly Aerospace, based in Central Texas, successfully landed a robotic vehicle on the moon last year. In Houston, there is Intuitive Machines, whose machines have also reached the surface of the moon, and Axiom Space, working on a commercial space station.
Each of those Texas companies has contracts with NASA to work on aspects of the Artemis program, helping astronauts get back to the lunar surface.
“We see Texas as a leader in space,” said Heather Pringle, the CEO of the Space Foundation, a Colorado nonprofit that seeks to advance the industry. She said her group has been holding Texas up as a model for other states to follow, pointing to its combination of research support, low taxes and talent pipeline, as well as its commitment to human space travel, like the Artemis II mission, and to military technology.
The state created its own Space Commission in 2023, which has handed out $150 million in grants and is poised to hand out hundreds of millions more. And on the grounds of the Johnson Space Center in Houston -- near a field where longhorn cattle still munch grass -- Texas A&M University is set to open a new $200-million Space Institute this fall.
The moment felt to many like a “rebirth” of the Space Age, said William Harris, the president of Space Center Houston.
“I’m excited,” said Mayor John Whitmire of Houston in an interview. He recalled gathering by the television with friends for the moon landing in July 1969.
“We watched it in disbelief,” he said. “Do y’all really think somebody did that?”
Whitmire also said Houston has been working to clean up some of the tributes to its spaceflight heritage, such as Tranquillity Park, across from City Hall. Named for the area of the moon where Armstrong took his first steps, it has fallen into disrepair since it opened a decade after the moon landing.
The Astrodome, the most prominent vestige of the city’s midcentury space-era, has sat vacant and moldering for decades and may never be occupied again.
And while many in Houston were following the flight of the Artemis astronauts, many others were not.
At a gas station just outside the Johnson Space Center campus, Stephen Faust, 35, prepared tacos surrounded by blue lights and images of rockets and planets meant to evoke space travel. He said he had been unaware of any rocket launch.
“We have all this because we’re near NASA, but I had no idea,” Faust said, adding that he thought the launch sounded “awesome.”
But, he said, he was more interested in seeing money spent exploring the deep ocean.
Rana Basu, who works in the oil and gas industry, also found that not everyone in Houston was as excited about the Artemis II mission as he was. He ended up with two extra tickets to the launch party Wednesday at Space Center Houston and could not find any takers.
“I asked 50 people,” he said, standing in line before the launch. “A lot of my friends aren’t paying attention.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.