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| Building on history: A worker rests a moment during a break at the new Davidson Center for Space Exploration, part of the
US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. Patrik Jonsson |
From the back of a bike to the moon
American space research returns to its original launching pad in Huntsville, Ala.
from the January 31, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
"It's an unlikely combination of German rocketeers, former enemies, teaming up with primarily country boys who grew up on farms, who combined to pull off the 20th century's greatest event, the moon landing," says Ralph Petroff, a Huntsville entrepreneur and member of the Saturn V executive committee planning this week's celebration. "They used to joke that this is a rocket made by hillbillies."
As the 1950s program geared up and the earth rumbled during test firings out at the Redstone Arsenal, the space program became anything but theoretical for Huntsville residents.
"At that time the Russians had launched Sputnik and we were in a war, we thought, for the health and welfare of the United States, and all of Huntsville got behind the program and welcomed it," says Ms. Smith. "They supported it by repeatedly replacing windows" that were blown out by rocket tests, sometimes as far away as 20 miles.
But as the Apollo program was shut down in the late 1970s and rocket-engine testing moved to Mississippi, Huntsville's focus slowly changed.
To be sure, today it's a city of 100 languages, an entrepreneurial boomtown that epitomizes the rising economic stature of the New South. But the Ares project and the 2005 Base Realignment Act, which will move a major military command and thousands of military personnel to the city, promises to launch the city into a new era, says John Southerland, a chamber of commerce spokesman.
Yet the city's challenge is probably greater than what NASA and others are making public, says David Christensen, an aerospace consultant who worked with von Braun on the Saturn project. When the space shuttle is retired in 2010, the American space program will be at the mercy of the Russians, who alone will have the capability of sending human payloads skyward. NASA engineers are now scrounging the Saturn V archives for clues and direction, he says.
"We're trying to struggle around and get momentum going and get parts together," says Mr. Christensen. "It's difficult and very expensive and time consuming ... and it's going to be even worse than what we're expecting, that [five-year] gap."
Enter Tim Pickens.
His fledgling rocket company, Orion Propulsion, was born from Pickens's work on Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne – where the ideals of alternative, fast, and inexpensive solutions to rocket problems are embodied in a garage-mechanic ethos.
Pickens's tumultuous workshop in Huntsville looks more like a farm implement shop than a rocket lab. It's packed with piles of valves and spigots, greasy lathes, and even a surplus vacuum chamber used to burst, or explode, rocket canisters. In one corner is a truck-rocket that's fired using a modified Xbox controller.
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