Not signed in (Sign In)

WorldWeird: Rocket City Residents Don't Care About Moon, Mars

Bottom of Page

1 to 2 of 2

  1.  
    •  
      CommentAuthorgroonk
    • CommentTimeApr 30th 2008
     (2046.1)
    Yeah, it's a filler piece of news, but I live here(Rocket City/Huntsville) and damn if the article ain't true. The city where von Braun built spaceships to the moon is more infatuated with the new mall. Space conquests are afterthoughts, if that much.

    Four decades later, the Huntsville phone book still lists 37 businesses with "rocket" in their name, including a motorcycle dealer, a chiropractor and a meat processor.

    Yet NASA's mission to return astronauts to the moon - and eventually send them to Mars - has attracted little public interest here, despite the fact that Huntsville engineers are developing the next generation of rockets for the project, which could create as many as 2,900 jobs in the city within five years.

    "In the '60s and '70s, it was exciting. Everyone had space fever," recalled Polly Morton, a longtime resident who works with the city's tourism bureau.

    These days, she said, plans to explore the heavens are overshadowed by more immediate earthly concerns - like the war in Iraq and concerns about whether the government will have the money to complete the $100 billion Constellation program that began in 2005.


    I've a friend working on the Ares project. Sometimes he shares interesting happenings. The stuff he can talk about anyways.
  2.  (2046.2)
    And the sad part is the Rocket Park there is one of the coolest places to go visit for space fans/geeks/tourists. Really, i can't wait to get back up there and take my son around again. You can sit inside and see what a those capsules were like. Probably the closest I wil ever come to being an astronaut, but even for a few seconds it was pretty damn exciting.

1 to 2 of 2

  1.