Before the Horses,
It Was Called Rocket City

Drive east out of Orlando, past the airport and out toward Bithlo, and the houses start to spread apart. The lots stretch to an acre, then past it. A horse stands behind a long wood fence. It’s about as close to open country as you can get and still have an Orlando address — and it was drawn up, once, to be a city for the men who would land on the moon.

The place is called Wedgefield now: a golf course, a country club, a few thousand people on big quiet lots. But the first name on the paperwork, back in the early 1960s, was Rocket City.

That isn’t a cute nickname somebody coined later. It was the pitch, and it was the plan.

The year someone drew a city for the moon

In the early 1960s the coast twenty-odd miles east of here was the most exciting place in America. Cape Canaveral was throwing the biggest machines anyone had ever built straight up off the ground, and Kennedy Space Center was hiring engineers and technicians by the thousand.

Cape Canaveral, 1961

So a developer looked at a wide, empty stretch of pine and palmetto east of Orlando and did the natural thing for Florida: he drew a city on it. Roughly twenty thousand acres of it — not a subdivision, a city — a planned town to house the people who were about to put Americans into space. On the maps it was Rocket City. Sometimes Cape Orlando.

And the pitch nearly sold itself. Serious people believed Florida’s midsection was the future. In November 1963, President Kennedy himself stood at the Cape while Wernher von Braun walked him down the length of a Saturn rocket — days before Dallas. The whole country was leaning in.

The Cape, November 1963

Florida had sold the horizon before

Here’s the thing, though. Florida had run this exact play once already, a generation earlier.

Selling Florida, 1922

In the 1920s, developers drained swamp, cut roads into the scrub, and sold lots to people up north who had never set foot on the ground they were buying. Sometimes there was a real city at the end of it. Often there was a grid of empty streets and a lot of palmetto.

Rocket City was that same move in a jet-age suit: cut the roads first, name the streets, print the map, and let the boom pour in behind it. For a little while, it did.

What the map was actually drawn on

Because here is what was really out there, under all that promise. Palmetto. Flat, low country — saw palmetto and wiregrass and slash pine, wet in the summer, the kind of ground that stands in water when it rains and bakes hard when it doesn’t.

What the map was drawn on

Beautiful in its own flat way — big sky, open prairie running off toward the St. Johns River — but a long way from a rocket, and a long way from a grocery store. A lovely place to be if you wanted room. A hard place to sell as a bedroom suburb.

Big sky, not much else

The boom that lasted about two years

For a couple of years it worked anyway. Roads went in. Lots sold. The map filled up with promise. And then it came apart.

The boom went bust. The launches stayed on the coast — but the rocket workers mostly didn’t want to live out here in the palmetto, and the town that had been drawn for twenty thousand acres never filled in behind the roads. The developer didn’t last, and the land changed hands more than once.

A new owner would try a new name, hang a new promise on it, and watch it not quite catch. In the 1970s the billionaire John D. MacArthur took his own swing at reviving the place as Cape Orlando. That didn’t hold either. Finally, in 1983, yet another owner renamed it one last time — Wedgefield — put a golf course on it, and let the place become whatever it was going to be.

The city for the moon never really arrived. What stayed behind was the room it had been drawn on.

What was left was room

The roads were already cut. The lots were already surveyed — and surveyed big. So Wedgefield filled in the way empty things in Florida fill in: slowly, one house at a time, each sitting on an acre or more, with a lot of air between them.

Nobody ended up shoulder to shoulder. People got space instead — a pasture, a barn, a workshop out back, somewhere to keep a couple of horses. The failed rocket suburb quietly turned into horse country, and the street names that survived lean more toward the paddock than the launch pad.

Still cow country (now)

The part that never got built

And here is the real twist. The piece of the dream that failed hardest — all that land meant to become dense city that never got a single house — is right next door, and it’s the best part.

Thousands of those acres became the Hal Scott preserve: longleaf-pine savanna and the Econlockhatchee River bending through it, cattle standing in the shallows, no rooftops at all. The emptiness that was supposed to be the failure turned out to be the thing people now drive out here to find.

The part that never got built (now)

So the next time someone tells you Wedgefield is just a golf community with roomy yards, you can tell them the truth: it was drawn up to be a city for astronauts. And the one promise the rocket dream actually kept — the only one — was the space between one house and the next.