Rocket garden

Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex Rocket Garden in 2004.

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.

Incomplete list of rocket gardens

• Kennedy Space Center, Merritt Island, Florida
• Air Force Space & Missile Museum, Cape Canaveral, Florida
• U.S. Space & Rocket Center, Huntsville, Alabama
• National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC (indoors)
• Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas
• Thiokol, near Promontory, Utah
• Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia
• 1964 New York World's Fairgrounds, Flushing Meadows Park, New York. Now the New York Hall of Science
• White Sands Missile Range, near Las Cruces, New Mexico
• New Mexico Museum of Space History, Alamogordo, New Mexico
• National Atomic Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico
• National Museum of the United States Air Force, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio
• Fort Sill, Lawton, Oklahoma
• Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace, Le Bourget, France
• Air Power Park, Hampton, Virginia
• F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Cheyenne, Wyoming
• Woomera, South Australia
• Historisch-technisches Informationszentrum, Peenemünde, Germany

Photos

• Rockets in Huntsville Alabama.JPG

  U.S rockets at the Space & Rocket Center. Huntsville, Alabama.

• HuntsvilleSpaceCenterRockets.jpg

  Authentic Saturn 1 (left) and replica Saturn V (right) at Huntsville, Alabama.

• NASM-indoor-rocket-garden-up WL.jpg

  Indoor rocket garden, National Air and Space Museum.

• Thiokol-rocket-garden-jumble WL.jpg

  Thiokol rocket garden, Utah.

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  Air Force Space and Missile Museum, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.

• Woomera2.jpg

  Woomera Missile Park, Woomera, South Australia

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  KSCenter Visitors Center rocket garden

• KSC Visitors Center rocket garden - Saturn IB & F1.JPG

  KSC Saturn IB & F1 engine

See also

• Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex#Rocket garden
• rock garden, likely the inspiration of the term "rocket garden"
• sculpture garden, another example of a "garden" displaying nonliving, manmade objects

External links

• Kennedy Space Center Rocket Garden
• United States manned space boosters on display from A Field Guide to American Spacecraft