Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Kennedy Space Center is located on Merritt Island, Florida, north-northwest of Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic Ocean. It sits midway between Miami and Jacksonville on Florida's Space Coast, due east of Orlando and about one hour's drive away.
President Lyndon B. Johnson named the facility on the 29th of November 1963 under Executive Order 11129, one week after President John F. Kennedy's assassination. Kennedy had visited the construction site twice in 1962 and again a week before he died on the 22nd of November 1963.
The first rocket launch from Kennedy Space Center was Apollo 4, an uncrewed Saturn V flight, on the 9th of November 1967. The Saturn V's first crewed launch was Apollo 8's lunar orbiting mission on the 21st of December 1968.
The Vehicle Assembly Building is a 130,000,000-cubic-foot hangar capable of holding four Saturn Vs and was the largest structure in the world by volume when completed in 1965. The center spans a property of about 140,000 acres supporting more than 1,500 species of plants and animals.
NASA announced in April 1972 that it would fly the Space Shuttle from KSC because of its existing facilities, its location on the Intracoastal Waterway, and its southern latitude, which gives a velocity advantage for easterly near-equatorial orbits. NASA had seriously considered building a new site at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
Hurricane Frances struck directly on the 7th of September 2004 with sustained winds of 70 miles per hour and gusts up to 94, tearing 1,000 exterior panels from the Vehicle Assembly Building. Central Florida is called the lightning capital of the United States, and NASA estimates 5 to 8 inches of sea level rise by the 2050s.