From our room in the practically brand-new Townplace Suites Hotel in Six different NASA rockets are on display. This is rocket science Huntsville we could see the lines of cars queued up to enter Gate 9 to the Redstone Arsenal. Early in the morning and in late afternoon each day the broad road is covered with slow-moving vehicles, as the tens of thousands of workers make their daily commute.

The Arsenal, on the edge of the city of Huntsville, was a center of chemical weapons research and production during World War II. During the frantic last days of the war, when the German military machine had collapsed and the American, French, British and Russian troops were beginning to establish the rules for governing the defeated countries, American forces managed to arrest many German scientists, including the rocket team led by Werner von Braun. The first American base to house this team was in New Mexico, at White Sands, but within a short time the headquarters for space and rocket research had moved to Redstone Arsenal where Dr. Von Braun continued to lead the work at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. Towering hundreds of feet high, the Saturn V display is a model, but the real rocket is shown, its stages separated, inside the exhibit hall. Saturn V model

With peacetime, American scientists turned their attention to additional possible missions for rockets, including President Kennedy's Cold War directive to put a man on the moon. This brought funding and publicity to "rocket science" and associated highly complex research. Today, NASA missions are known worldwide. In the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, where the Apollo missions and others were conducted, scientists are working on the more powerful SLS Space Launch System to reach Mars.

We spent a day at the Space and Rocket Center. Part museum, part theme park, it is a dazzling array of exhibits and interactive experiences.We arrived just at opening time and found ourselves fascinated throughout many hours, finally giving up at the end of the afternoon following visits to historic exhibits of space flight and rocketry. The orange boxy shape is mounted on four legs on a surface supposed to resemble the rocky moonscape. Model of lunar module

The museum has a lot of great exhibits about NASA and the rocket program, chiefly the big Saturn V booster. As we learned on the bus tour, when they tested the five Saturn engines together (which produced 7.5 million pounds of thrust). They had 80 feet of concrete on bedrock rock, the vibrations were measured on a seismometer in Montgomery at 3.1 on the Richter scale, the flames jutted out a quarter mile, and crazy guys who didn't know better stood on the test block hundreds of feet in the air to watch. They used 13 water pumps powered by locomotive engines to pump water to cool things down as the rockets fired. The water came from two huge tanks which in turn filled up by taking a big gulp out of the Tennessee River.

We spent the morning roaming the museum part, then ventured outdoors An exact model of a portion of the International Space Station used for performing science projects is replicated in the Payload Operations Center. Space Station simulator where school groups were enjoying a couple of vaguely space-related thrill rides. The Space Camp sponsored by the Center apparently runs year-round; a photo wall contains pictures of its graduates who have found their way into challenging technical careers. Old folks are welcome to apply for Space Camp, but we decided to pass!

We watched a National Geographic file about robotics, using 3-D glasses; it was excellent for us as a taste of some of the work being done.

After lunch we took the bus tour of the facilities where our morning discoveries were put in perspective. The bus ride was very good. We visited the Payload Operations Center. A lot of NASA programs were cut back, as they cost 5% of the Federal budget, but the International Space Station (ISS) is still active. From the U.S. point of view, Houston is Mission Control for the The copper-colored robot has gripper hands and a vaguely humanoid shape. HUNCH robot ISS at Johnson Space Center, while Huntsville is Payload Control. Scientists and Engineers who work for Teledyne Brown monitor the experiments being performed by the U.S. on the ISS and communicate with the astronauts regarding the scientific parts of the activities. When they are working with rats they put paper up over the window so the bus tour passengers can't see. They have a replica of the ISS so they can perform activities in Huntsville to reproduce what's happening in space.

The HUNCH progam stands for High School Students United with NASA to Create Hardware. Currently one favorite piece of equipment aboard the ISS is a 3-D printer. (E.g., astronauts are only given one spoon and others must be printed.) The plans were made by high school students. High school students also designed and built the robot in the sim lab (see picture.)

We were told that NASA is cautiously optimistic that funding will be increased in the future, because President Trump wants to send a man to Mars.