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Merritt Island occupies a narrow barrier strip of land on Florida's Space Coast, separated from the mainland by the Indian River Lagoon and from the Atlantic by Cocoa Beach. It is not a city in the conventional sense, with a downtown grid and a restaurant row, but rather a place defined almost entirely by what surrounds it: one of the most ecologically rich estuarine systems on the eastern seaboard, and one of the most consequential pieces of real estate in the history of human exploration. That combination, wild marshland alongside rocket launch infrastructure, gives Merritt Island a character unlike anywhere else in the United States.

The Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge covers more than 140,000 acres and shares its boundary with Kennedy Space Center, an arrangement that came about because NASA needed a buffer zone and the land happened to be exceptional habitat. Manatees move through the lagoon in winter. Bald eagles nest here in numbers that would surprise visitors expecting a purely industrial landscape. The refuge is home to more threatened and endangered species than any other refuge in the continental United States, a fact that sits in productive tension with the launch pads visible on the horizon. Visitors who come only for the space programme sometimes find themselves lingering at a roadside pull-off watching roseate spoonbills wade through the shallows.