Ellington Field

The plaque stops at the 1984 airport; the field's other life is spaceflight. NASA became a tenant in 1962, and Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts kept their flying sharp here in T-38 Talon jets; from 1967 the field also staged Apollo lunar landing training. In 2025 NASA still flew about twenty T-38s from Ellington, along with three WB-57 high-altitude jets, the only ones flying anywhere. In 2015 the field became the Houston Spaceport, the nation's tenth FAA-licensed commercial spaceport. Its first anchor tenant, Intuitive Machines, put its Nova-C lander on the moon in February 2024.

What the plaque says

Ellington Field In 1917, during World War I, the Houston Chamber of Commerce lobbied the federal government to establish an air field here. Named for Lt. Eric Lamar Ellington, an Illinois aviator killed in a California plane crash in 1913, it opened in November 1917. The site transferred to the National Guard during the 1920s, and following a fire and demolition, all that remained by the 1930s was a concrete water tank. The government retained ownership, leasing the site for grazing cattle. By the 1940s, the threat of another world conflict caused the U.S. to reactivate the base. Ellington was vital to American war planning during World War II due to its strategic location near oil refineries and the Houston Ship Channel. Construction began in 1940, and among the first improvements was a service apron believed to be the largest concrete slab in the world at the time. Troops began arriving at the modernized facility in April 1941. Ellington was primarily a pilot training center, but navigators and bombardiers, as well as aviators from other countries, also trained here. Because the field was operational prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, one of every ten Army pilots went through its flying school in the first two years of the war. Later, the Army Air Force ran an advanced navigator training school here. After the war, Ellington was home to a Texas Air National Guard unit. During the Cold War, it again became an active Air Force base, primarily for navigator training. The Air Force abandoned the base in 1976, and the site has since been shared by the Texas Air National Guard, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Texas Army Guard, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the City of Houston, which, since 1984, has used much of it for a municipal airport. Texas in World War II, V+60 (2005)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Space Center Houston — 5.8 mi
  The visitor center of NASA's Johnson Space Center at Clear Lake, with flown capsules, a shuttle replica riding a 747, and tram tours to Mission Control and a Saturn V.
• San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 12 mi
  The 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
• Emancipation Park — 15 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 15 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Genoa United Methodist Church — 2.2 mi
• First United Methodist Church of Pasadena — 3.5 mi
• San Jacinto Community College District — 5.4 mi
• First Airplane Flight Over Texas — 5.5 mi