U.S. Space & Rocket Center

U.S. Space & Rocket Center

The U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama is a museum operated by the government of Alabama, showcasing rockets, achievements, and artifacts of the U.S. space program. Sometimes billed as "Earth's largest space museum", astronaut Owen Garriott described the place as, "a great way to learn about space in a town that has embraced the space program from the very beginning."

Opened in 1970, just after the second manned mission to the lunar surface, the center not only showcases Apollo Program hardware but also houses interactive science exhibits, Space Shuttle and Army rocketry and aircraft. With more than 1,500 permanent rocketry and space exploration artifacts, as well as many rotating rocketry and space-related exhibits, the center occupies land carved out of Redstone Arsenal adjacent to Huntsville Botanical Garden at exit 15 on Interstate 565. The center offers bus tours of nearby Marshall Space Flight Center.

Two camp programs offer visitors the opportunity to stay on the grounds and learn more about their respective subject matter. U.S. Space Camp gives an in-depth exposure to the space program through participant use of simulators, lectures, and training exercises. Similarly, Aviation Challenge offers a taste of military fighter pilot training including simulations, lectures, and survival exercises. Both camps provide residential and day camp educational programs for children and adults.

Read more about U.S. Space & Rocket Center:  Exhibits, History, Buildings, Governance, Visitors, In Popular Culture

Famous quotes containing the words space, rocket and/or center:

    For good teaching rests neither in accumulating a shelfful of knowledge nor in developing a repertoire of skills. In the end, good teaching lies in a willingness to attend and care for what happens in our students, ourselves, and the space between us. Good teaching is a certain kind of stance, I think. It is a stance of receptivity, of attunement, of listening.
    Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)

    A rocket is a reed that thinks brilliantly.
    José Bergamín (1895–1983)

    When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)