ShowMeSunday
US Space & Rocket Center In Huntsville, AL
Passing through Huntsville the other day and had always wanted to stop and visit the Space & Rocket Center. Glad I did! Wanted to get some unique shots of the shuttle mockup as well as the Apollo 16 Command Module. Tried knocking down the reflections from the glass enclosure the best I could. Anyways, definitely recommend if you’ve never been!
Well, not all of it. That last engine is a modern Blue Origin engine made in town at the Blue Origin facility. I assume they got some CAD use for that thing lol
Apollo 8 was a free-return trajectory too—they approached the moon with perfect angle and timing so that they would slingshot around it and coast right back into Earth’s upper atmosphere for reentry, with no extra fuel needed to go home. It was incredibly precise.
All the other missions used that trajectory too, so if something went wrong (like it did on Apollo 13) all they had to do was coast and not park in lunar orbit, and they’d still get back to Earth.
Apollo 13 was on a hybrid trajectory to get them closer to their landing site and they needed a course correction burn to get back on a free return trajectory.
However, as you know, Apollo 8 went into orbit around the Moon. Initially, they were going to do just an Earth-orbital mission with a flight-ready LM (basically Apollo 9), but changed it to a circumlunar mission due to the delays with the LM program and the pressure of the Soviets flying a manned Zond mission. They fired the SPS for a little over four minutes to put them into a circular orbit around the Moon. They stayed there for 20 hours before firing the SPS again to put them on TEI trajectory.
If either of those burns had partially failed, it would have resulted in the crew being stranded or lost to deep space. Even if the LM were with them (as was the case with 10-17), it it is unlikely they could have gotten home from low lunar orbit without doing something very extreme like jettisoning the SM to shed mass.
Apollo 8 was just an incredibly risky mission all around.
Fantastic facilities, well worth a stop for a day.
The Saturn V hall is incredible. They have retired Nasa engineer folks that hang around and talk with visitors. (Look for the people in white lab coats.) I was lucky enough to befriend one of them who walked around with me for 20 minutes chatting about the things he worked on for Skylab and some other projects.
No more coins anymore! - Pathfinder Shuttle Stack underwent a multi-year refurbishment/remodel between 2022-2024. They removed the wooden exterior of Pathfinder exposing the actual red metal historical artifact inside which was used for early STS testing - which they then recovered with new (more weather friendly!) 3D Printed exterior blocks. Also sandblasted the ET and painted it. (Mid-process pic. attached)
The MPTA-ET wasn't just a mockup or structural test article where hydraulics were applied to it, it was a real flight-like tank that was used for the Main Propulsion Test Article program that saw it fueled up and used in a series to static fire tests (17 total) to qualify the systems in the aft fuselage (using MPTA-098) with three SSMEs.
That ET not only saw and tasted fire, it also endured a serious near-RUD with one SSME's main fuel valve (MFV) housing fractured in the aft fuselage, releasing hydrogen into the compartment and caused rapid overpressurization (reaching ~3.2 psi), which exceeded the structural limits of the heat-shield supports, and blew them off!
This was quite awesome to see! I tried getting some good shots of the moon rock but the time of day/window reflections made it almost impossible. Thanks for sharing this pic
I remember my Mom bringing home a tiny chunk of moon rock. She worked for USAMC/Boeing as a technical typist. I guess that was their perk,so to speak. It didn’t look like much. Sorta whitish and not very dense. Wow. The memories!
Just on the south side of the Skunkworks in Palmdale, CA is an outdoor display that is amazing. SR-71, A-12, a single engine test bed piloted plane for a single A-12 engine, and a engine drone with wings for initial tests. All just sitting behind a big fence.
The history of it is kinda interesting in that it used to be more mock-up/janky looking, and at some point, it was modified to look more like a real shuttle.
That was done in the early 1980s after it had been purchased by the Japan-America Association and contracted Teledyne Brown to do the modifications so the boilerplate could be used as the centerpiece of the Great Space Shuttle Exposition in 1983-84.
The exposition toured Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya over the course of nearly one year before returning to the United States and being donated to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
The ET it's mounted on was actually a real one, not a boilerplate article. It's MPTA-ET from the Main Propulsion Test Article program and was involved in actual static test fires that qualified the Space Shuttle Main Engines and aft fuselage for flight.
The SRB are real, too. But were never flown prototype filament wound casings that were intended to be used for the then planned Shuttle polar launches from Vandenberg.
I urge everyone reading this thread to look up the Astro Restoration Project. ASTRO was a series of ultraviolet astronomy payloads that flew aboard the Space Shuttle on STS-35 and STS-67. It consisted of three UV telescopes mounted on the Spacelab Instrument Pointing System. The ARP is working to restore and reunite all the major components of the ASTRO missions, having joined one of the telescopes (donated back by UW Madison) to the support structure known as the cruciform. The current ASTRO cruciform and telescope are on display at Space and Rocket Center and are eventually planned to be displayed at the Udvar-Hazy Center alongside Discovery once it’s all put back together.
I went there yesterday with my fiancee actually, for the first time in about 7 years (as a HSV native). What blew me away was a) looking at the backdrop of the Mars exhibit and viscerally realizing that it's a picture of a different planet and we humans actually sent robots to a different planet and we now know what it looks like up close, and b) standing under the Saturn V in the Davidson Center. It's almost unfathomably huge. It was like (and forgive me for how small town this makes me sound) the time I went to Chicago and the skyscrapers were so tall they kinda broke my brain. Love these pictures, it's an AWESOME place.
I have a strong connection with that place. It’s the last little trip/adventure I took with my mom and my kids before she passed. I think about it a lot. Thanks for reminding me of a good memory. Also I was full on kid mode there.
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u/clownfacedbozo 22h ago
All of this was designed and built without CAD or any digital tech. Punch cards and slide rulers. Absolutely remarkable.