A rocket garden is a display of missiles, sounding rockets, or space launch vehicles usually in an outdoor setting. The proper form of the term usually refers to the Rocket Garden at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.
With rare exceptions, rockets are expendable, so rockets in displays have not been flown. As in the case of the Saturn V, later planned missions were cancelled, leaving unneeded rockets for the museums. For displays of the early American space hardware (for Project Mercury and Project Gemini), surplus missiles have been painted to look like manned space launchers. Also, engineering test articles (such as the Pathfinder space shuttle stack in Huntsville) or purpose-built full-scale replicas end up in rocket gardens.
Read more about Rocket Garden: Incomplete List of Rocket Gardens, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words rocket and/or garden:
“Along a parabola life like a rocket flies,
Mainly in darkness, now and then on a rainbow.”
—Andrei Voznesensky (b. 1933)
“I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;”
—William Blake (1757–1827)