Huntsville is Alabama’s largest city and less than two-hours drive from Chattanooga. Karen and I spent the last weekend in March exploring “The Best Place to Live in Alabama.”
In 1950 Wernher von Braun and his team moved to Huntsville’s Redstone Arsenal to build rockets. Their efforts resulted in the Saturn V rocket that carried Apollo astronauts to the Moon in 1969 and the creation of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center with its huge collection of rockets and space memorbilia.
The Apollo 12 moon rocket is visible from the freeway and calls space enthusiasts to delve deeper in man’s quest to fly among the stars.
A squirrel monkey named Baker and rhesus monkey named Able were the first primates to return from space alive. On May 28, 1959 the pair were strapped inside the nosecone of a Jupiter missile, hurled 300 miles into the air at 10,000 mph, and splashed safely into the Atlantic 15-minutes later.
This Saturn V rocket is one of the only three remaining in the world and hangs in stages from the ceiling of the Davidson Center of Space Exploration on the U.S. Space and Rocket Center Grounds. Here you’ll find the Apollo 16 command module, a Lunar Module, Moon rocks, Mobile Quarantine Facility, Skylab mock-up, gigantic rocket engines and much, much more.
The Pathfinder atop its launch rockets is an imposing sight. After years of outdoor exposure, the shuttle is being refurbished to exposition configuration.
The mock-up of a LEM on the moon’ surface is one of dozens of fantastic artifacts in the giant outdoor display area of “Earth’s largest space museum.”
It was July 16, 1969 when Lyndon Baines Johnson joined the crowd at Cape Kennedy to witness Apollo 11 blast off with the first astronauts to walk on the moon. For anyone awed by the prospects of exploring outer space, a visit to the U.S. Space and Rocket Museum in Huntsville, AL will be a grand experience.