The U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, is a museum dedicated to telling the story of the U.S. rocket program, from a classified U.S. Army program to the future of NASA’s human spaceflight program. The museum tells that story with the Saturn V rocket as its central theme.
The Threat Status team was given an exclusive tour during OPERATION Huntsville. Follow Defense Tech Reporter John T. Seward as he gets the inside scoop from curator and space historian Ed Stewart.
[SEWARD] I’m John Seward with Threat Status at The Washington Times at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center here in Huntsville, Alabama. I’m here with Ed Stewart. Ed, thanks for giving us an exclusive tour.
[STEWART] My pleasure. I’m looking forward to it.
[SEWARD] And what’s your role here at the museum?
[STEWART] My job title is curator, and I take care of all of our rockets, do all of our research for our signs. This place is in my bones. I love this stuff. I was hoping to be an astronaut when I was a kid, but it turns out, health-wise, I couldn’t do it. I think I found the next best thing, though.
[SEWARD] We want to start at the big Green Army rocket.
[STEWART] Absolutely. The rocket that’s in front of us right now is called the U.S. Army Redstone, and it was kind of our first missile designed to carry a nuclear warhead. All of these rockets that kind of continue on towards the big one at the end of the row here are all based off of this. The Redstone gets evolved into this thing that’s in front of us, and it’s called a Juno-1 or a Jupiter-C, which was the rocket that launched the first American satellite. So that’s our first step into taking a weapon and converting it into something that can be used for other functions.
The second step was when we took a Jupiter missile that looked just like this one, and instead of putting a nuclear warhead inside of it, we put a special capsule and put two primates in there, Able and Baker. Launched them into space, splashed them down in the ocean near Puerto Rico, and they survived. And we kind of made that step now from, all right, we know we can put a piece of equipment into space. We can also send things that look and are shaped vaguely like humans and can be trained probably better than humans. And we can send them up into space. They can be in weightlessness. They can survive reentry and come out, none the worse for wear.
[SEWARD] It seems like a lot of the rocket technology is basically like bouncing back and forth between, like, the military use and then the, the space or scientific use.
[STEWART] Yeah. So it’s less, it’s less back and forth and more sort of parallel. They’re kind of both going at the same time, right? Like when they, when they start the Juno and Jupiter-C program, they don’t abandon the Army Redstone. But they just kind of have these two parallel tracks that are going. So the Army is continuing to do its thing with its weapon systems, but what eventually becomes NASA takes advantage of all the learning that’s happening there and then finds ways to utilize those platforms for different things. And in some cases, it’s literally as simple as swapping out the warhead for a space capsule.
[SEWARD] That’s amazing. You want to head inside?
[STEWART] Absolutely.
You know, I started here actually working in the Space Camp programs. And over time, we’ve gone from these hundreds of thousands and millions, eventually, of kids coming to Space Camp, and then some of them finally making it into the astronaut corps. And then from the corps, they actually make it into space.
[SEWARD] That’s awesome.
[STEWART] So this is our Saturn V. And now this is not a flight vehicle. This was a developmental view.
[SEWARD] But it is, it is an actual Saturn.
[STEWART] It is an actual Saturn V. Yeah.
So basically, when you launch a huge rocket, if you’re not careful with your design parameters, you can actually literally shake your rocket apart just from the sound that it produces. And so this vehicle was designed to test that, and to test the vibration that it would feel during flight. You see a rocket, most of what you’re looking at, including on this one, is fuel tank, the vast majority of it. And the engines themselves are kind of just the little stubby things at the end. Each one of these produces a million and a half pounds of thrust. So all together, you’re seven and a half million pounds of power pushing this six and a half million pound rocket up into space. And an engine technology that could be ignited and then turned off in flight and then restarted again. And that in particular was a huge technological breakthrough.
[SEWARD] From your perspective, what does that feel like when you’re around so much of the history?
[STEWART] It’s super interesting to me to kind of see that evolution and see what comes out of it. I mean, you’re talking about thousands and thousands of patents for new materials, new technologies, new manufacturing methods, all of these things that came about in order to do this one technological thing. You know, you could tie that into the current AI, and the just raw computing power in that is far less than I have in my Fitbit on my wrist.
It’s just mind-blowing.
Now, as important as all of that was from a scientific standpoint, Huntsville did have an interesting set of responsibilities once the astronauts started landing on the surface. People have probably seen video of the moon buggy bouncing around on the lunar surface. So we have one over here, and this one was another test article. The ones that went to the moon stayed on the moon.
[SEWARD] Couldn’t afford the fuel to bring them back.
[STEWART] Exactly right. The rocket would have had to have been so much larger.
[SEWARD] Right.
[STEWART] But the lunar rovers were designed and tested here in Huntsville.
[SEWARD] I mean, it’s amazing to look at it in person and know that it’s the actual technology.
I’m a little bit of a car guy, right? So I’m looking at the suspension and seeing stuff that feels very familiar to, like, a modern four-wheel drive vehicle, but done in, like, much, much lighter weight and decades ago.
[STEWART] Absolutely.
[SEWARD] Which is amazing. It’s fascinating.
[STEWART] And this is an electric vehicle. Almost all those packs that you see there in the front are all battery packs.
[SEWARD] All batteries, okay.
[STEWART] Because you can’t really run around gasoline on the moon because there’s no air. So you can’t combust. And it really does have a sort of, like, dune buggy kind of feel as you watch them moving through the video footage and everything.
We’ll go over here and talk a little bit about the command module. So this is a flown Apollo spacecraft. This is the module from Apollo 16. This went to the moon, orbited around the moon while two crews landed. And then at the end, it brought everybody safely back home. At the end, the heat shield basically keeps you from burning up when you come back into the atmosphere.
[SEWARD] I mean, it’s designed to be a sacrificial material.
[STEWART] Exactly. The material becomes glowing red hot and it starts to delaminate and flake away. So that’s why you see the big chunks missing and everything. Sometimes a lot of people go, well, why don’t you clean the smudges and all this other stuff after that? I’m like, no, no, no, no. That’s part of the story. If you look inside, there are places where you can see, like, grubby hand marks and stuff inside the capsule…
[SEWARD] Like right there where, like, the lettering has started to rub off because they were using it so often.
[STEWART] Exactly. And, like, you look at the bar that goes across the top of the hatchway there, right? All of the grip, all the hand grips, everything, all those marks are there because those guys used that. And to clean it off or repaint it or something would just be a huge kind of loss for the story that this thing tells.
I wax poetic about cleaning things all day long.
[SEWARD] That’s so cool. Ed, thank you very much for sharing so much of what’s history with us and the space program. It’s been amazing.
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