Old Cocoa Beach
Decades

The 1960s in Cocoa Beach: 3,475 people to 9,952

The census counted 3,475 people in Cocoa Beach in 1960 and 9,952 in 1970. A 1966 study for NASA found missile workers made up about 60 percent of the Cocoa Beach Lions Club, and the town called itself the "Free World Space Center, U.S.A." What the records show about the boom decade.

By Old Cocoa Beach Updated October 15, 2026
The Apollo 11 Saturn V lifting off, July 16, 1969.
Apollo 11 lifts off from Launch Complex 39A on July 16, 1969, the end of the decade that nearly tripled Cocoa Beach. NASA via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The census counted 3,475 people in Cocoa Beach in 1960 and 9,952 in 1970. In ten years the town nearly tripled, and then it stopped: 10,926 in 1980 and 12,123 in 1990.

Newcomers and old-timers

A study done for NASA by Florida State University in 1966 caught the town in the middle of the change. It counted Cocoa Beach as part of the county’s central urban complex, with Cocoa, Rockledge and Cape Canaveral, surrounded by unincorporated development on the mainland and on Merritt Island. It drew its water by contract from the City of Cocoa, which also supplied Rockledge, Cape Canaveral, Merritt Island, the Cape, Patrick Air Force Base and NASA’s new launch area.

The study’s researchers looked at who ran the town’s clubs. In the Cocoa Beach Lions, missile industry workers made up about 60 percent of the membership, but they came to meetings inconsistently, and the real core was local business people. About half the members of the Cocoa Beach Woman’s Club were newcomers. The Surfside Players, the town’s theater company, had 650 ticket holders and 100 to 150 active members, put on six plays a season, and found that audiences liked lighter productions best.

The seven Mercury astronauts in a group photograph.
The Mercury Seven: Gordon Cooper, Walter Schirra, Alan Shepard, Virgil Grissom, John Glenn, Donald Slayton and Scott Carpenter, photographed in 1963 at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston. NASA (S63-18853) via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

”Free World Space Center”

The town sold the space program as hard as anyone. According to the State Archives of Florida, Cocoa Beach styled itself the “Free World Space Center, U.S.A.” Visitors came for the launches as soon as they were allowed: in 1963 the Defense Department let the public drive through the Cape Canaveral area on Sunday afternoons, in 1965 NASA opened tours of the space center to the public, and by 1967 more than a million people had come.

After the boom

The 1970s were a different decade. Cocoa Beach added fewer than 1,000 people between 1970 and 1980, and by the 2020 census it had 11,354, fewer than it counted in 1990. The county’s growth since has gone elsewhere, as Old Space Coast’s account of the space boom shows.

Further Reading

Sources

  1. U.S. Census Bureau, 1970 Census of Population, Number of Inhabitants: Florida, Table 6
  2. U.S. Census Bureau, 1990 CPH-2-11, Population and Housing Unit Counts: Florida, Table 10
  3. Annie Mary Hartsfield, Mary Alice Griffin and Charles M. Grigg, eds., Summary Report: NASA Impact on Brevard County (Florida State University, 1966), NASA Technical Reports Server
  4. State Library and Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, "Florida and the Apollo Program: Building the Space Coast"
  5. U.S. Census Bureau, QuickFacts (2020 census count)

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