Brown, were among Lyndon Johnson's foremost supporters. Brown and Root's founders, brothers Herman and George R. The dominant presence of Brown and Root, a Houston-based engineering and industrial construction corporation, in the design of many of the original Manned Spacecraft Center buildings attests to the web of business and political connections in which NASA was enmeshed. Webb Corporation of Phoenix, to develop Clear Lake City, a fifteen-thousand-acre new town on what had been in the 1930s the ranch of Houston lumberman James M. Humble formed the Friends-wood Development Corporation, which initially collaborated with the Del E. What names do not reveal is the high-stakes real estate game through which the Humble Oil and Refining Company (now ExxonMobil) donated two-thirds of the center's sixteen-hundred-acre site to NASA (using Rice University as their nonprofit conduit) in order to set the stage for development of the adjacent new town of Clear Lake City. Johnson in 1973 identifies one of the key personalities responsible for NASA's being here (not named but also of critical importance was Houston's congressman Albert Thomas). The naming of the complex for President Lyndon B. Although the science and politics of rocketing Americans to the moon overshadowed the politics of Houston real estate development, the latter were strikingly evident in the freewheeling way that Texan power elites exploited their growing influence nationally to secure NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center for Houston.
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