"The jet that had rushed him here from Washington, after that midnight briefing with the President, was now dropping down toward one of the most familiar, yet most exciting, landscapes in all the world. There lay the first two generations of the Space Age. Spanning twenty miles of the Florida coast to the south were the giant gantries of the Saturns and Neptunes, that had set men on the path to the planets, and had now passed into history."
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001%3A_A_Space_Odyssey_(novel)