Rocket Garden

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.