In 1961, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided to build its Manned Spacecraft Center near Houston, the city began an identity with the old ports of western Europe that played leading roles in the great adventures of two, three, and four centuries ago. Technical direction of America’s effort to put the first man on the moon will come from Houston. The government is spending well over a hundred million dollars—it may come to far more than that in the end—to build office buildings, laboratories, and massive test communications and control facilities on range land near Clear Lake. The millions of dollars to be invested by industry to serve the center are incalculable. Slowly the character of the city will change as the migration of space scientists merges with Houston and with oil, the city’s mover and shaker for half a century. “It is likely,” the Dallas _News_ said in 1962, “that even many Houstonians have no conception of what is happening and what it may mean to their community.” [Illustration: _Salvador Dali’s surrealistic impression of Houston was a result of his visit to the city in 1952. The flaming giraffes symbolize oil derricks, at which a woman, her face covered with camellias, looks with eager expectation. The port and the pioneers are shown in other symbols._] [Illustration: _This, apparently painted in the 1920s, is an unknown artist’s conception of Houston in 1980._] [Illustration: _The new Els: Speedways for amateurs_] When the astronauts moved to Houston in 1962, their presence gave breath to what had seemed a fantasy to many Houstonians, who more than most Americans will experience vicariously the most extraordinary adventure in history. How far Houston has come since two New Yorkers paid $9,428 for a townsite and named it for the hero of the Battle of San Jacinto! The interval between that date and the arrival of the astronauts was but 125 years. What is Houston that it has become so much? Beginning life three thousand years after Athens and two thousand after London, beginning two centuries after Boston and New York, fifty years after Los Angeles and at nearly the same time as Chicago, Houston suddenly joined the family of metropolises midway in the twentieth century. Its likeness in history, however, is to none of those cities, but to Carthage of North Africa, one of the most famous cities of antiquity, whose beginning preceded Houston’s by twenty-six centuries. Carthage, like Houston, was above all a commercial city, its people vigorous, practical. At one time Carthage was famous for the great wealth of its leading families; Houston was once known as the Land of the Big Rich. And the sea, or access to it, was the key to the rise of both. As Carthage became the richest city of the western Mediterranean, Houston became the richest of the Gulf of Mexico. Carthage lived for fifteen centuries and died abruptly, disappearing from history.