I'm still at a loss as to what you people think the benefit of launching from Ascension is and what value that would have that could possibly have that would be worth the trouble of locating all of the infrastructure currently at KSC to an island in the middle of the ocean.
Ascension Island would offer two possible benefits for launching from. First, as it is at a significantly lower latitude than Cape Canaveral, it would offer larger payloads into equatorial orbits, just as Kourou does relative to the Cape. Second, as is completely surrounded by ocean it would offer clear ranges in all directions, enabling one launch facility to handle all types of payloads. Due to the Caribbean islands on the one hand and the East Coast on the other, Cape Canaveral is functionally unable to handle payloads that need to be put into polar orbits, which has led to the United States also operating Vandenberg on the West Coast (whose range limitations make it impossible to handle payloads that
don't need to be put into polar orbits). So there are legitimate reasons for building a launch base on Ascension as opposed to the U.S. mainland.
The problem, however, is two-fold. First, the logistical cost of locating the launch center there as opposed to the mainland is almost certainly larger than the benefits. For France it's worthwhile to put their main launcher center overseas because there aren't any suitable locations in France anyway, but there are plenty of locations in the United States that are good enough that it's just not worthwhile to go to the trouble of needing ocean-going ships and aircraft to carry everything for a bit of a payload boost.
Second, this misses the point of Cape Canaveral in the first place, which was as a
test range for missiles. These could be fired to the south-east such that they would have a minimal chance of impacting anyone even if they malfunctioned or went off-course, while still passing by a series of stations for tracking and studying the missiles in flight--including, as it happened, Ascension Island. Theoretically you could put the launch site on Ascension and fire north-westwards instead, but then an overshoot leads to the rocket landing on the U.S. mainland and possibly harming people or causing damage, as had been demonstrated in the earlier New Mexican V-2 tests. By contrast, firing from Cape Canaveral means that an overshoot lands in the ocean, no harm done. Thus, it makes more sense to build up the Cape as a missile test center.
But, of course, once you have all of the infrastructure needed to fire missiles from the Cape, you
also have all the infrastructure needed to fire orbital rockets as well. Thus, it's much easier to simply turn the Cape into a space launch center than to build a new one. The same was basically true of the Russian and Chinese launch complexes as well, although in the former case there were some issues with their early Kapustin Yar site vis-a-vis ICBM testing that led them to build a new site for the latter, which became Baikonur.
Setting up electricity,water,fuel,housing.... if you're going to do off the mainland USA then might as well look at Hawaii,Panama,Puerto Rico so at least the enormous expenditures have some political benefit. Remember Kendall Square in Cambridge Ma. was razed to house what went to Houston, because JFK was Prez, when LBJ took over he wasn't stupid, talk about bringing home the bacon. Ascension would have needed dilithium crystals or helium 3 to garner any interest.
This is incorrect. "What went to Houston" was the Space Task Group at Langley--in Virginia. Langely was adequate to house the Mercury program, but it was obviously not sufficient for the Gemini and Apollo programs, so work on locating a replacement began rather early. While there was definite lobbying to place the Manned Spaceflight Center in Massachusetts, that state never had a serious chance; the leading candidate was actually MacDill Air Force base in Florida, close to Tampa, but that was predicated on the Air Force closing down that base, which it chose not to. The choice then fell to the second candidate, which was Houston (the third candidate was San Francisco, which would have been interesting later on). Of course politics was definitely a factor in how high Houston ranked, but this had little to do with Johnson (who was only Vice President and not particularly popular within the administration); instead, the fact that key members of multiple House committees were part of the Texas delegation was probably the controlling political factor. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Chair of the House Budgetary Committee, and several members of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics were all Texans.
In any case, this decision was made in 1961, so that construction began in 1962 and was completed in September 1963, two months before Kennedy was shot. By the time Johnson took office, the location of the Manned Spaceflight Center (aka Johnson) had been firmly set. Of course Johnson didn't mind it being located in Texas once he became President, but he was hardly "taking home the bacon" at that point.
