Rocket garden
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A rocket garden is a display of missiles, sounding rockets, or space launchers, 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.
[edit] Incomplete list of rocket gardens
- Kennedy Space Center, Merritt Island, Florida
- USAF Space and 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
- 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
 US Space and Rocket Center rocket garden, Huntsville, Alabama. |
 The Saturn 1 at Huntsville is authentic; the Saturn V is a replica. |
 Indoor rocket garden, National Air and Space Museum. |
 Thiokol rocket garden, Utah. |
 Air Force Space and Missile Museum, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. |
[edit] See also
- rock garden, likely the inspiration of the term "rocket garden"
- sculpture garden, another example of a "garden" displaying nonliving, manmade objects
