Marshall Space Flight Center
Coordinates: 34 ° 42 ′ 40 ″ N , 86 ° 39 ′ 13 ″ W.
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The Marshall Space Flight Center ( MSFC ) is a NASA facility at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville , Madison County , Alabama . The employees develop rocket engines , computer and network technologies as well as programs for information management .
US President Dwight D. Eisenhower inaugurated the center on September 8, 1960 in honor of General George C. Marshall , who had recently passed away, in his name. It had already started operations a few months earlier in the old buildings and with staff from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA). The first director was Wernher von Braun , who had previously been relocated with his team from Fort Bliss in Texas to the Redstone Arsenal site.
NASA described the Center in 1960 as a single nation within the nation that is capable of a spacecraft of which is idea , the design , the development and construction and testing up to the successful start to bring . The launch facilities for Cape Kennedy were designed here. The MSFC engineers led the test starts in Florida and then evaluated the data in Huntsville. This was repeated from the Mercury to the Gemini to the Apollo program with the successful moon landings from 1969 to 1972. For the latter, the Saturn launch vehicle was developed in the MSFC until it was ready for launch . The idea of the lunar roving vehicle was also successfully implemented.
Further developments dealt with the construction of space laboratories like Skylab and the use of scientists in space towards the end of the 1970s . Many satellites were also designed, built, and placed in orbit at the MSFC .
The main focus, however, was on the development of the propulsion system for the space shuttle with the propulsion of the space shuttle, the external tank and the two booster rockets . During the shuttle era, many MSFC developments were successfully tested in Earth orbit. Many of the scientific payloads that the shuttles transported had their origins in an idea by MSFC employees.
In the 2000s, the MSFC was involved in the construction of the International Space Station ISS , the American contributions of which were almost exclusively developed here. After the Columbia accident at the beginning of 2003, great importance was attached to the smoothest and fastest possible setup when the shuttle flights resumed from 2005.
Part of the Marshall Space Flight Center is the Payload Operation Center or Huntsville Operations Support Center ( HOSC ) whose task is the planning and implementation of scientific experiments, especially on board the international space station.
List of directors of the MSFC
- Wernher von Braun (July 1960 to January 1970)
- Eberhard Rees (March 1970 to January 1973)
- Rocco Petrone (January 1973 to March 1974)
- Jody Singer (since September 2018)
