Photo courtesy of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center
The new multi-million-dollar project elevates refurbished rockets onto pedestals, surrounded by new landscape and hardscape.
It is springtime, and for many of us, the warm weather turns our thoughts to gardening, planting, cultivating and renewing our surroundings.
The same tasks are happening right now at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, a popular museum in Huntsville, Ala., although its plantings are considerably taller.
Rather than daisies or geraniums, workers are planting rockets in the museum's garden — and those roots run very deep in this north Alabama city.
Since 1960, Huntsville has been the home of NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, helping it earn the nickname "The Rocket City." The facility was built near Huntsville's Redstone Arsenal, a World War II-era base that was later chosen by the U.S. Army as a site for rocket and missile development.
Toward the end of the war, the U.S. military brought several German rocket scientists, led by Wernher von Braun, to Huntsville to work with American specialists in creating ballistic rockets. In the 1950s and ‘60s, von Braun and his team lent their expertise to engineering some of the first rockets and satellites to reach outer space and orbit the Earth, in addition to the legendary and massive Saturn V rocket that sent America's Apollo astronauts to the moon, thus achieving the goal of preeminence in space.
Since then, Huntsville and the Marshall Space Flight Center has continued to be world renowned for its engineering efforts to put humans in space.
New Park to Be Forest of Tall Rockets
Ed Stewart, the curator of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, told Huntsville's WAAY-TV April 15 that the museum's upgraded "rocket park" will be like nothing anyone has ever seen.
"If you've been here before and you've walked through ‘Rocket Row,' as I like to call it, this will be a much different experience," he said.
The space vehicles on display have names like Jupiter, Mercury Redstone, Juno II and Saturn I. These early rockets broke barriers, set records, brought a nation together for a common goal and expanded our knowledge of the universe.
Now, they are getting the respect they deserve, Stewart explained.
He and his team are giving these icons of NASA's past a new life, Stewart noted, adding that the upgraded display will be a showplace for the pioneering hardware that made early space exploration possible.
"It's going to be a whole new look and feel. I think we're really doing them justice in how we're going to represent them."
The new multi-million-dollar project elevates the refurbished rockets onto pedestals, surrounded by new landscape and hardscape.
But it's been a long — sometimes frustrating — road to get to this point, Stewart told WAAY-TV.
"I would say the biggest challenge we've run into is mother nature," he said.
Alabama's fickle weather has thrown more than one curve at the construction effort. Windy conditions mean that no crane work can be done to lift the rockets into place. Additionally, rain has occasionally turned the job site into a muddy bog.
"We had the freeze in January which brought things to a screeching halt," he reported. "I really think that's the biggest challenge we've bumped up against."
But it was all worth it, Stewart said, if the end result is showing the public the beginnings of America's space program, which continues to this day in north Alabama.
"[Everything on display] is directly related to either the Redstone Arsenal or the Marshall Space Flight Center and this amazing city's history in the aerospace industry," he added.
Stewart said the museum's administrators hope to open the new Rocket Park to the public later this year.
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