Marshall Space Flight Center

• 1. Introduction

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  Marshall Space Flight Center sits on the grounds of Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, and it is the place where the United States learned to leave Earth. When 127 German missile specialists signed work contracts with the U.S. Army in August 1945, almost no one imagined that those signatures would eventually propel human beings to the surface of the Moon. The center they helped build went on to become the largest NASA facility in the country, responsible for some of the most consequential engineering achievements of the twentieth century.

  How did a military rocket program rooted in Nazi Germany’s wartime weapons research transform itself into the engine of peaceful human spaceflight? Who were the scientists and engineers who carried that knowledge across the Atlantic, and what did they build once they arrived? And what happens to a place whose founding mission - sending people to the Moon - is accomplished, and then taken away?

• 2. The Paperclip Inheritance

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  After Germany’s defeat in May 1945, the United States launched Operation Paperclip, a systematic effort to recruit scientists and engineers who had built the Nazi military’s most advanced weapons. At the center of that effort was Wernher von Braun, who had led V-2 missile development at the Baltic coast research facility Peenemünde. Nearly all of the German specialists who joined him in America had worked alongside him there.

  The group was initially sent to Fort Bliss, Texas, where they spent the better part of five years adapting and improving the V-2 for American use. Testing was carried out at the nearby White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico. One early achievement stood out: von Braun was permitted to use a WAC Corporal rocket as a second stage attached to a V-2, creating a combination called Bumper that reached an altitude of 250 miles, a record at the time.

  In 1949, the Army approved moving the rocket research program from Fort Bliss to the newly consolidated Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville. About 1,000 people made that transfer beginning in April 1950, and the German specialists came with them. In mid-1952, the Germans were hired as regular civil service employees; most became U.S. citizens in 1954-55. Von Braun was appointed Chief of the Guided Missile Development Division, and the work that would eventually produce the Saturn V had begun.

• 3. The Race to Orbit

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  In September 1954, von Braun proposed using the Redstone missile as the core of a multi-stage rocket capable of launching an artificial satellite. The Army’s Project Orbiter study, completed a year later, laid out detailed plans and schedules. Then higher authorities intervened, directing that the satellite program be assigned instead to the Naval Research Laboratory and its Vanguard rocket.

  The consequences of that decision became visible on the 6th of December 1957, when the NRL’s Vanguard rocket barely left its launch pad, fell back, and exploded. The Soviet Union had already placed Sputnik 1 in orbit on the 4th of October 1957, followed by Sputnik 2 on November 3. American prestige was in free fall.

  After finally receiving permission to proceed, von Braun and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency team moved fast. On the 31st of January 1958, a Jupiter C in a Juno I configuration placed Explorer 1 into orbit - the first American satellite. Critically, a four-stage Jupiter C had actually possessed the capability to orbit a payload as early as the 20th of September 1956. Only direct intervention by President Eisenhower, limiting that flight to a two-stage re-entry vehicle test, had prevented the United States from reaching orbit a full year and a half before it did.

• 4. Building the Saturn Family

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  On the 25th of May 1961, just twenty days after astronaut Alan Shepard completed America’s first suborbital spaceflight, President John F. Kennedy committed the country to a lunar landing before the decade was out. The task of building the rockets fell squarely to Marshall Space Flight Center, which had officially opened on the 1st of July 1960 with von Braun as its first NASA director and his longtime colleague Eberhard Rees as deputy for research and development.

  Three new liquid-fueled engines had to be designed and qualified: the J-2, the H-1, and the F-1. The F-1 is the most powerful single-nozzle liquid-fueled rocket engine ever used in service, each one producing 1.5 million pounds of thrust. Originally started by the Air Force, F-1 development was taken over by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in 1959, and the first test firings at Marshall took place in December 1963.

  The Saturn I flew first on the 27th of October 1961; the Saturn IB followed on the 26th of February 1966, carrying a single J-2 engine in its upper stage capable of being restarted in flight. The Saturn V, designed under the direction of Arthur Rudolph, was the largest and most powerful launch vehicle ever brought to operational status by any measure of combined height, weight, and payload. Its first stage carried five F-1 engines for a combined thrust of 7.5 million pounds. Static test firings of that first stage at Marshall produced earthquake-like rumbles across the Huntsville area and could be heard 100 miles away.

  On the 16th of July 1969, a Saturn V lifted the Apollo 11 spacecraft and its three-person crew toward the Moon. Of the fifteen Saturn Vs built, thirteen flew flawlessly. The last one carried Skylab into orbit on the 14th of May 1973.

• 5. Living Laboratories in Orbit

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  Skylab grew out of the Apollo Applications Program, a broad effort to make scientific use of Apollo hardware after the Moon landings. In December 1965, Marshall was authorized to begin the Orbital Workshop as a formal project. At a meeting at Marshall on the 19th of August 1966, NASA Associate Administrator George E. Mueller settled on the final concept for its major elements. The station was renamed Skylab in February 1970 and was built into the propellant tanks of a Saturn V third stage, fully refitted on the ground.

  To prepare astronauts for zero-gravity work in Skylab, Marshall opened a 75-foot-diameter water-filled Neutral Buoyancy Facility in March 1968. The tank let engineers and crew members simulate weightlessness before they ever left the ground. When Skylab sustained severe damage during its launch - losing its micrometeoroid shield and one main solar panel - the first crew, launched on the 25th of May 1973, spent 28 days in orbit making repairs and getting the station operational. Two more crews followed, staying 59 and 84 days respectively. Across all three missions, Skylab logged roughly 2,000 hours on around 300 scientific and medical experiments.

  Also attached to Skylab was the Apollo Telescope Mount, a solar observatory assigned to Marshall in 1966. Its eight major instruments observed the Sun across wavelengths from extreme ultraviolet to infrared. Because the data was captured on special photographic film, astronauts had to perform spacewalks during missions to physically swap out the film canisters.

• 6. Eyes on the Universe

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  The Hubble Space Telescope was, in many respects, Marshall’s most complicated project. Congress funded its development in 1978 after years of advocacy from the astronomy community, including Lyman Spitzer, and the National Science Foundation. Marshall held responsibility for the telescope’s design, development, and construction; the project scientist was C. Robert O’Dell, then chair of the Astronomy Department at the University of Chicago. The primary mirror, 2.4 meters in diameter, was produced by the optics firm Perkin-Elmer. Marshall had no way to test the mirror’s performance until the telescope was in orbit.

  Hubble launched in April 1990, and the flaw revealed itself almost immediately: the primary mirror had spherical aberration. A first repair mission, STS-61, flew in December 1993, with astronauts practicing their procedures beforehand in Marshall’s Neutral Buoyancy Facility. Additional servicing missions followed in February 1997, December 1999, March 2002, and May 2009. Each one was rehearsed underwater at Marshall. The final servicing left Hubble performing considerably better than its original specifications.

  The Chandra X-ray Observatory followed a similar path through Marshall. Preliminary studies for a large X-ray telescope began even before its predecessor, the Einstein Observatory, launched in 1978. Marshall built the only X-Ray Test Facility of its size in the world, opened in 1976. Chandra launched on the 23rd of July 1999, aboard Shuttle Columbia, as the heaviest payload a Shuttle had ever carried at roughly 22,700 kilograms. Its angular resolution of 0.5 arcseconds gives it a thousand times better resolution than the first orbiting X-ray telescopes. Its highly elliptical orbit - reaching one-third of the way to the Moon at its farthest point - allows continuous observations for up to 85 percent of its 65-hour orbital period.

• 7. The Shuttle and Its Losses

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  When President Nixon announced the Space Shuttle program on the 5th of January 1972, Marshall was assigned responsibility for the orbiter’s three main engines, the solid rocket boosters, and the external tank. The first spaceworthy Space Shuttle, Columbia, completed its first orbital test flight on the 12th of April 1981. That mission, STS-1, carried two astronauts and verified the performance of the entire system.

  Marshall’s propulsion role placed it at the center of both Shuttle disasters. On the 28th of January 1986, Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch when a leaked flame from a joint on the right solid rocket booster burned through the external tank. Cold weather had contributed to an O-ring failure in that joint. Marshall held responsibility for the solid rocket boosters. A complete redesign and extensive retesting followed. No Shuttle flew for the remainder of 1986 or through all of 1987; flights resumed with STS-26 in September 1988.

  The Columbia disaster on the 1st of February 2003 traced to the external tank - also Marshall’s responsibility. A piece of insulation that broke off during launch damaged the thermal protection on the orbiter’s left wing, causing the vehicle to break apart during reentry. NASA’s response did not alter the tank significantly; instead, the agency required inspection of the orbiter’s critical elements before every future reentry. The Shuttle program was retired in 2011, leaving the United States dependent on Russian Soyuz spacecraft for crewed missions to the International Space Station until SpaceX Crew Dragon became operational in 2020.

• 8. What Marshall Builds Next

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  Marshall’s role did not diminish after the Shuttle. The first U.S. module of the International Space Station, Unity or Node 1, was built by Boeing in facilities at Marshall and launched in December 1998. Harmony, or Node 2, managed by Marshall, was attached to the station’s Destiny laboratory in October 2007; it provided connection hubs for the European and Japanese modules and allowed the resident crew to grow to six. The 18th and final major U.S. element, the Starboard 6 Truss Segment, arrived in February 2009, activating the full set of solar arrays and raising the power available for science to 30 kilowatts.

  In November 2010, Marshall entered a new field when FASTSAT - weighing just under 400 pounds - launched from Kodiak Island, Alaska, aboard a Minotaur IV rocket. FASTSAT carried six experiments including NanoSail-D2, the first satellite ever deployed from another satellite in orbit. It was developed in partnership with the Von Braun Center for Science and Innovation and Dynetics, both of Huntsville.

  In early March 2011, NASA headquarters announced that Marshall would lead development of the Space Launch System, a heavy-lift rocket intended to carry human-rated payloads beyond low-Earth orbit, following a line of work that traces directly back to the Saturn V. Meanwhile, the James Webb Space Telescope - whose mirrors were tested at the only facility in the world capable of testing large telescope mirrors in a space-simulated environment, located at Marshall - is now returning observations using the largest primary mirror ever assembled in space.