For those of us of a certain era, Cape Canaveral evokes thundering, historic liftoffs of rockets into space. The Apollo 11 mission that landed the first men on the moon, in 1969. The dawn of the space-shuttle age with the launch of Columbia, in 1981. And the subsequent end of that era, in 2011, when NASA retired the shuttle program and started sending astronauts to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in the former Soviet Union, for rides aboard Soyuz spacecraft. If all goes as planned, NASA’s send-off for its next two astronauts,…
