Florida school has watched rocket launches for 60 years; Artemis II will be the last

On a sandy strip of Florida coast, there's a school playground where children have looked up and watched history blast off across the sky.

For more than 60 years, pupils at Cape View Elementary in Cape Canaveral have paused lessons, stepped outside, heard a distant rumble and watched as rockets have climbed high into the sky above the trees.

Now, as Nasa prepares Artemis II - the next crewed mission that will fly astronauts around the Moon - for the school, it's one last space mission before closing.

Cape View, the only elementary school in Cape Canaveral - which is for children aged 5 to 11 - is closing at the end of the school year.

Cape Canaveral is the part of Florida where rockets lift off from Kennedy Space Center. That's why people call it the 'Space Coast'.

The decision was made due to fewer numbers of pupils and high maintenance costs. Now for the school that watched the Apollo rockets launch to the Moon, Artemis II will be the final launch visible from its grounds.

Former pupil Paul S. Davison was a pupil there when Cape View opened in the 1960s. "I lived on the Space Coast from 1961-68 while my father was an Air Force officer stationed there and I attended Cape View from 1964, when it opened."

Paul remembers the first human spaceflights. "The first manned launch that I would have seen would have been Alan Shepherd's in May 1961." Alan Shepherd was the second person and the first American to travel into space.

When it came to watching rocket launches, TV was best for the close-up view, before moving outside: "Our best view at first was on TV. After a few seconds after liftoff, we could go outside and watch the rocket climb above the trees."

Spaceflight was thrilling for Paul as a young child, but he says delays like the ones Artemis II has encountered, were not unusual in the 1960s either. "There were quite a few delays. I remember getting up early repeatedly in January and February 1962 hoping to see a launch, only to see a message on the TV screen that the launch had been postponed."

Paul's family later moved to Houston, Texas, where Nasa controls missions. He had astronauts who lived across the street from his house and was later a guest at the Kennedy Space Center for the launch of the Apollo 15 - which was the fourth Moon landing mission.

While at Cape View Elementary, Paul says the launch pads for rockets were a few miles away, so children couldn't feel the rumble of launches under their feet, but watching Apollo 15 set off, he was "far closer" than he had "ever been".

"From that distance, the Saturn V's noise and vibration were overwhelming," he said.

Saturn V (five) was Nasa's giant rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts to the Moon - at the time, the most powerful rocket ever flown, that is until Artemis I, which was powered into space using the Space Launch System (SLS) in November 2022.

Cape View's view of rocket launches didn't end with the Apollo era.

Shayne King, whose daughter was a pupil, remembers how ordinary and wonderful launch days felt. "Cape Canaveral was a great place for my daughter, Sydney, to grow up.

"Rocket launches were such an everyday part of our lives. During the work or school day, we would just step outside to watch it."

She says one distinct memory was hearing the sonic-boom - when a spacecraft returns faster than sound, it makes a huge bang in the air: "We could hear the sonic boom whenever the space shuttle returned to Florida. It was so loud!

"It wasn't until we moved away that we truly appreciated just how cool it was to live there."

Shayne told Newsround that her daughter grew up to be a teacher and would share stories with the children in her class about rocket launches in Florida.

"Weird to think that other kids have no real concept of what it is like to experience a rocket launch - something so common to kids in Florida," she said.

Cape View's gates will close, but the sky above Cape Canaveral won't and the children from the school might still be able to see rocket launches, albeit from a few miles further away. They're being reassigned to another school, Roosevelt Elementary.