Nassau Bay, Texas

Everything Nassau Bay is known for

18 songs mention this city 0 artists from here

Nassau Bay, Texas, was developed in the 1960s to house NASA families when the Manned Spacecraft Center rose directly across the road, and that space-program identity runs through the music connected to it. Twelve songs in our collection orbit this corner of Clear Lake, including "NASA" by Ariana Grande and "Houston, We Have A Problem" by Hank Williams Jr.

While no artists in our collection call Nassau Bay home, few places on Earth have a soundtrack so tied to looking up.

Music in Nassau Bay

Songs About Nassau Bay

Smile
Scarface
41%
"And as you journey into outerspace"
Abortion
Lil Wayne
35%
"I'm shooting for the stars, astronauts dodge bullets"
Oklahoma Space Program (feat. John Fullbright & Hošty)
Steve Hamby; Zac Wenzel & Gus and the Saddle Tramps
18%
"Oklahoma Space Program"
That’s Just Me
Drew Womack
18%
"A rocket man with a cool space suit and weighted boots Counting down to take you on a trip to the moon"
Houston (We've Got a Problem)
Doug Moreland
17%
"TITLE"
What’s the Use?
Mac Miller
16%
"Space shuttle, Elon"
NASA
Ariana Grande
8%
"It's like I'm the universe and you be N-A-S-A"
KMAG YOYO
Hayes Carll
7%
"Armstrong ain't got nothing on me"
Houston We Got A Problem
Chaser Crouch
7%
"TITLE"
Ohio (Come Back to Texas)
Bowling for Soup
6%
"NASA wants you back"
Houston, We Have A Problem
Hank Williams, Jr.
6%
"Mission Control, all systems were go"
Man on the Moon
Megan Moroney
5%
"But can somebody call NASA"
Deeper
Freddie Gibbs
5%
"Only difference is he tryna be a fuckin' astronaut"
Houston, We Got a Problem
Luke Combs
4%
"Houston, we got a problem"
Love You To The Moon
Kip Moore
4%
"Mission control says the engine is a-go"
We Didn’t Start the Fire
Billy Joel
4%
"Sally Ride"
All American
Clay Walker
3%
"Now he's an astronaut"
Houston Is Hot Tonight
Iggy Pop
2%
"Project X, hey, Houston control"

Artists From Nassau Bay

No artists from Nassau Bay in the database yet.

Rivers & Roads in Song near Nassau Bay

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Nassau Bay.

Interstate 45 8 songs Trinity River 11 songs Interstate 10 36 songs US Route 90 9 songs U.S. Route 59 9 songs FM 3005 2 songs

History of Nassau Bay

The Astronaut Neighborhood Where Children Watched the Press Arrive RoadyGoat

More than 60 astronauts eventually lived in these quiet streets, including moonwalkers Alan Bean, Gene Cernan, and David Scott, plus Jim McDivitt, Richard Gordon, Michael Collins, Walter Cunningham, and Roger Chaffee. Kirk Griffin, son of flight director Gerry Griffin, remembered the neighborhood as a world unto itself: kids roamed Nassau Bay by bicycle and pedaled toward NASA whenever news trucks rolled in. It worked like an extended military family, where residents watched each other's children and sometimes phoned the police when reporters parked on lawns or crowded an astronaut's family. The space program's dangers were never far away. Griffin recalled being in elementary school alongside Sheryl Chaffee, daughter of Apollo 1 astronaut Roger Chaffee. After the Apollo 1 cabin fire killed Chaffee, Gus Grissom, and Ed White on January 27, 1967, school staff quietly came to take Sheryl out of class, and the Chaffee family left the neighborhood soon afterward. It is a firsthand childhood memory that captures how this small suburb absorbed both the triumphs and the losses of the race to the Moon. (Source: NASA Johnson Space Center oral history, Kirk Griffin.)

The $49 Million Town Built for the People Racing to the Moon RoadyGoat

The waterfront streets around you were a cattle pasture inside living memory. Until 1962 most of present-day Nassau Bay was the 570-acre Spirit of 1776 Ranch, owned by Houston cattleman Colonel Raymond Pearson. When NASA picked the Clear Lake area for its Manned Spacecraft Center, Pearson sold out to a development group led by Jack Kamin, and the plans that followed were staggering. The proposed residential and commercial community was pitched at an extraordinary 49 million dollars. Architect Thompson McCleary of Caudill, Rowlett and Scott helped lay out a whole town at once: houses, apartments, offices, shops, a hotel, a hospital, a private club, marinas, and parks. The first families arrived in 1964, and the place ballooned from roughly 400 people to 2,979 by 1968, incorporating in 1970. Every detail was aimed at NASA employees being uprooted from California, Florida, and Virginia. The canals, the tropical name, the marina, and the waterfront atmosphere were all engineered to convince reluctant transfers that they had not been exiled to an empty Texas cattle field. (Source: Handbook of Texas; City of Nassau Bay history.)

RoadyGoat →

When Nassau Bay Threw a Party for Soviet Cosmonauts RoadyGoat

During the Apollo-Soyuz era this neighborhood did something almost unthinkable for the height of the Cold War: it built a sister-city relationship with Star City, the Soviet cosmonaut training community outside Moscow. When Soviet cosmonauts visited the Houston area, Nassau Bay hosted celebrations with Russian food, dancers, and cultural programs. Think about who lived here. These were the very families working to beat the Soviet Union in the Space Race, and now they were welcoming Soviet space travelers onto their own streets and into their own gatherings. The backdrop was historic. In July 1975 an American Apollo and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft docked together in orbit and crews shook hands in space, the first international human spaceflight. The Nassau Bay and Star City connection turned that grand diplomatic experiment into something intimate and local: shared meals, folk dancing, and visiting space crews in a small Texas waterfront town. For a few years, the front line of the Cold War ran straight through a suburban block party here. (Source: NASA oral histories; Apollo-Soyuz Test Project records.)

Johnson Space Center - Mission Control

1961

Home of NASA's Mission Control Center, where every American human spaceflight from Gemini IV through the International Space Station has been directed.

Historical Marker →

Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center

1961

Mission Control for every American crewed spaceflight since Gemini IV. 'Houston, we've had a problem' was spoken to this building.

Historical Marker →

The Texas Killing Fields — I-45 Corridor, League City

1971

The twenty-five-mile stretch of Interstate Forty-Five between Houston and Galveston has a name most locals know and most visitors don't: the Killing Fields. Since the early nineteen seventies, the remains of more than thirty young women have been found in drainage ditches, caliche pits, and vacant lots running alongside the highway through League City and Dickinson. Investigators believe multiple…

Curated → · 4.1 mi away

Saibara, Kiyoaki

1904

Kiyoaki Saibara, developer of the Gulf Coast rice industry, was born in Kochi Ken, Japan, in 1884. At the age of eighteen he came to Texas on the request of his father, Seito Saibara , to help produce the first rice crop in Texas using seed imported from Japan in 1904 at Webster in Harris County. Saibara, who was an engineering student studying shipbuilding at the time, arrived with his family, a group of laborers, and 300 pounds of seed rice as a gift of the emperor of Japan. He later practiced airplane seeding in water and raised Santa Gertrudis cattle to rotate pasture and rice land. In the 1940s Saibara affirmed his loyalty to "American ideals and institutions" through short-wave radio broadcasts to the people of Japan, and his four sons served in the United States armed services. Saibara was briefly interned after the war. He became a United States citizen in 1953, after forty-nine years in the country, and served as an elder in the Webster Presbyterian Church. His second wife, Takako, whom he married in 1955, was a well-known Japanese poet who taught the art of ikebana (flower arranging) and performed the Japanese tea ceremony. Saibara retired in 1964 and died on October 18, 1972. See also RICE CULTURE .

Tsha Handbook →

Saibara, Seito

1903

Seito Saibara, agriculturalist, college president, and developer of the Gulf Coast rice industry, was born in 1861 and came to the United States from Kochi, Japan, in 1901 to study theology at Hartford, Connecticut. At the time he was president of Doshisha University at Kyoto, which had been founded by American Congregationalists. A Tokyo lawyer and the youngest and only Christian member of the Japanese parliament at a time when Japan's government was anti-Christian, Saibara, a member of the liberal party, had been asked to assume the presidency of the Japanese college, relinquish his parliament seat, and acquire training in Hartford to educate the Japanese about Christianity. He was invited by the Japanese consul on behalf of the Houston Chamber of Commerce and the Southern Pacific railroad to teach rice production to local farmers and came to Texas in 1903. At Webster he subsequently founded the first Japanese Christian colony in Texas, brought over his family and thirty colonists to work with him, and began rice farming on a lease of 1,000 acres that he later purchased. The first crop, grown from seed imported as a gift from the Emperor of Japan and harvested in 1904, was primarily distributed as seed in Texas and Louisiana. Saibara's success is attested by the fact that by 1972 Texas rice production totaled two billion pounds. Saibara left Texas with his wife and spent fifteen years in South America, where he established colonies along the Amazon, before returning to Japan. Ill health caused him to return to Texas in 1937. He died, still a Japanese citizen, at Webster on April 11, 1939, and was buried in the community cemetery. His work was carried on by his son, Kiyoaki Saibara. See also RICE CULTURE.

Tsha Handbook →

Seito and Kiyoaki Saibara

1903

Seito Saibara (1861-1939), former president of Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, and first Christian member of the Japanese Diet (Parliament). Arrived in the United States in 1901 to study theology, and with the desire to establish a Japanese colony in America. Saibara came to Texas in August 1903 at the invitation of the Houston Chamber of Commerce to advise farmers on the cultivation of rice, which was emerging as a major cash crop. He decided rice farming was the ideal business for a colony, leased this tract of land (which he later purchased), and sent for his family. The oldest son, Kiyoaki Saibara (1884-1972), brought from Japan 300 pounds of Shinriki seed, a variety superior to native rice; and together, father and son planted a field near the canal (1/2 mile NE). Their first crops were utilized primarily for distribution as seed in Texas and Louisiana. The Saibaras built a house (250 yards S), and several families soon moved here from Japan, but the colonization effort failed because of disillusionment and homesickness of the new colonists. Seito Saibara aided the growth of the Texas rice industry with improved rice strains and agricultural techniques until his death, and Kiyoaki Saibara continued new developments until his retirement in 1964. (1974) This marker was originally located 1,090 yards to the southwest. Seito Saibara's house was 1,270 yards SW of here.

Historical Marker →

Things to Do in Nassau Bay

historical 0.7 mi away
NASA Johnson Space Center

Houston we have a problem. Where Mission Control guided Apollo 11 to the moon.
historical 0.9 mi away
Space Center Houston

Houston we have a problem. Every word spoken between Apollo astronauts and Earth came through Mission Control at NASAs Johnson Space Center in Houston. The…
food 20.7 mi away
The Original Ninfa's on Navigation

Ninfa Laurenzo was a widow with five kids when she opened a little restaurant in her late husbands failing tortilla factory on Navigation Boulevard in 1973.…
food 11.5 mi away
Killen's Barbecue

Chef Ronnie Killen's Pearland powerhouse. A classically trained chef who chose brisket over fine dining. The beef rib is absurd.
historical 14.2 mi away
San Jacinto Monument

On April 21 1836 Sam Houston and nine hundred Texans caught Santa Annas army napping at San Jacinto and won Texas independence in eighteen minutes. Six hundred…
historical 14.2 mi away
San Jacinto Monument

Taller than the Washington Monument. Where Texas won independence in 18 minutes.
historical 14.7 mi away
Battleship Texas

The last surviving WWI-era dreadnought. Fought at D-Day and Iwo Jima.
quirky 20.5 mi away
Eclectic Menagerie Park

An outdoor display of giant welded-metal sculptures along the edge of the Texas Pipe and Supply pipe yard including a King Kong hanging from a crane a 20-foot…

Everything Near Nassau Bay

852 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the nearest 200 are listed here — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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