A rocket garden or rocket park is a display of missiles, sounding rockets, or space launch vehicles, usually in an outdoor setting. The proper form of the term usually refers to the Rocket Garden at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. All rockets that have flown so far are at least partially expendable (in some rockets, certain stages or boosters get reused), 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 early American space hardware, such as Project Mercury and Project Gemini, surplus missiles have been painted to look like crewed space launch vehicles. Engineering test articles (such as the Space Shuttle Pathfinder stack in Huntsville) or purpose-built full-scale replicas are also displayed in rocket gardens.
Examples
Europe Musée de l'air et de l'espace, Le Bourget, France Historical Technical Museum, Peenemünde, Germany
North America U.S. Space & Rocket Center, Huntsville, Alabama Air Force Space and Missile Museum, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Cape Canaveral, Florida Kennedy Space Center, Merritt Island, Florida Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland New Mexico Museum of Space History, Alamogordo, New Mexico National Museum of Nuclear Science & History, Albuquerque, New Mexico White Sands Missile Range, near Las Cruces, New Mexico 1964 New York World's Fairgrounds, Flushing Meadows Park, New York; now the New York Hall of Science National Museum of the United States Air Force, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio Fort Sill, Lawton, Oklahoma SpaceX Starbase, Boca Chica, Texas Space Center Houston, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas Thiokol, near Promontory, Utah Air Power Park, Hampton, Virginia Wallops Flight Facility Visitor Center, Wallops Island, Virginia National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C. (indoors) Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Oceania Woomera, South Australia
Photos
See also Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex § Rocket Garden Rock garden, likely the inspiration of the term "rocket garden" Sculpture garden, another example of a "garden" displaying nonliving, humanmade objects
References
External links
Kennedy Space Center Rocket Garden United States launch vehicles on display from A Field Guide to American Spacecraft