Patrick: the base next door to Cocoa Beach
South of Cocoa Beach, the Navy's Banana River Naval Air Station was inactivated in 1947, handed to the Air Force in 1948 and renamed Patrick Air Force Base on August 1, 1950, as headquarters of the missile range. It is now Patrick Space Force Base.
The base on Cocoa Beach’s southern edge began as a Navy seaplane station. During World War II, according to the Air Force Space and Missile Museum’s history, it was the Banana River Naval Air Station. The war ended, and the base was inactivated in 1947.
The Navy years
The station was commissioned on October 1, 1940, as a sub-base of Naval Air Station Jacksonville, according to the Museum of Florida History. From December 1941 its PBM Mariner flying boats flew anti-submarine patrols off the coast, and by its peak it had 278 aircraft, 587 civilian employees and more than 2,800 officers and men, a small city beside a beach town that wouldn’t become a city itself until 1957. The war years are covered in full on Old Cape Canaveral’s air station page.
A missile range headquarters
The Air Force took it over within a year. The museum’s history gives the sequence:
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1947 | Banana River Naval Air Station inactivated |
| September 1, 1948 | Transferred from the Navy to the Air Force |
| June 10, 1949 | Renamed the Joint Long Range Proving Ground Base |
| August 1, 1950 | Renamed Patrick Air Force Base, for Maj. Gen. Mason M. Patrick |
A 1966 study by Florida State University for NASA explains the reason: the 1948 decision to put the country’s long-range guided missile program at Cape Canaveral. The Air Force made the old naval air station the base for the launch area and the headquarters of the Eastern Test Range, which ran almost 10,000 miles downrange to the Indian Ocean. The first missile launch from the Cape followed in 1950.
The town and the base
The base shaped the town beside it. Patrick drew its water by contract from the City of Cocoa, the FSU study notes, as Cocoa Beach did. Cocoa Beach’s motels did business with it directly: according to UCF’s RICHES archive, the Starlite Motel on A1A leased rooms to the Air Force, and its Starlight Lounge was a hangout for off-duty personnel from the Cape in the late 1950s.
The base carries the same name today under a new service. On December 9, 2020, at a ceremony on Cape Canaveral, Vice President Mike Pence redesignated the 45th Space Wing’s two installations as Patrick Space Force Base and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, according to the Space Force’s caption for the event.
Further Reading
- Live from Cape Canaveral: Covering the Space Race by Jay Barbree
- The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
Sources
- Air Force Space and Missile Museum, Patrick Air Force Base, Florida
- 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
- University of Central Florida, RICHES Mosaic Interface, Starlite Motel Postcard
- Museum of Florida History, World War II historical sites: NAS Banana River
- Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, Patrick AFB, Cape Canaveral AFS renamed as Space Force installations (photo 6453284, December 9, 2020)
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