In the 1950s this north Alabama town was best known for a leafy vegetable. Then the Army moved a team of German rocket engineers in, and Huntsville built the machine that left Earth.
A Pirep featured story · KHSV Huntsville International (Carl T. Jones Field), Huntsville, AL
Fly into Huntsville and somewhere off your wing stands a 363-foot rocket, upright on the north Alabama plain, visible for miles. It is a full-scale Saturn V replica, raised in 1999 for the 30th anniversary of Apollo 11, and the only vertical display of a Saturn V in the world. It marks the town where the most powerful machine humans had ever flown was designed.
In the 1950s Huntsville called itself the Watercress Capital of the World, a quiet farm town on the Tennessee River. Then the Army brought Wernher von Braun and his team of German rocket engineers to Redstone Arsenal in 1950, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center opened in 1960 with von Braun as its first director, and everything changed. The rockets that put the first American satellite into orbit were developed here. So was the Saturn V: 363 feet tall, five first-stage engines making 7.6 million pounds of thrust, and across thirteen launches it never failed to deliver a crew. Today Huntsville holds the second-largest research park in the country, and the town's identity flipped in one generation, from a vegetable to a rocket.
The U.S. Space & Rocket Center is where you stand under the result. The Saturn V inside the Davidson Center is real: the Dynamic Test Vehicle, a National Historic Landmark, one of only three authentic Saturn Vs displayed anywhere in the world, lying full-length so you can walk a moon rocket nose to fins. Outside, the vertical replica towers as the landmark you saw on the way in. This is also the home of Space Camp, and some of its graduates have gone on to fly in space; the town that built the machine now trains the twelve-year-olds who want to ride it.