Marshall Space Flight Center
rocketry and spacecraft propulsion research center
The Marshall Space Flight Center (officially the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center; MSFC), located in Redstone Arsenal, Alabama (Huntsville postal address), is the U.S. government's civilian rocketry and spacecraft propulsion research center. As the largest NASA center, MSFC's first mission was developing the Saturn launch vehicles for the Apollo program. Marshall has been the lead center for the Space Shuttle main propulsion and external tank; payloads and related crew training; International Space Station (ISS) design and assembly; computers, networks, and information management; and the Space Launch System. Located on the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, MSFC is named in honor of General of the Army George C. Marshall.
The center contains the Huntsville Operations Support Center (HOSC), also known as the International Space Station Payload Operations Center. This facility supports ISS launch, payload, and experiment activities at the Kennedy Space Center. The HOSC also monitors rocket launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station when a Marshall Center payload is on board.
History
MSFC has been NASA's lead center for the development of rocket propulsion systems and technologies. During the 1960s, the activities were largely devoted to the Apollo Program, with the Saturn family of launch vehicles designed and tested at MSFC. MSFC also had a major role in post-Apollo activities, including Skylab, the Space Shuttle, and Spacelab and other experimental activities which made use of the Shuttle's cargo bay.
Groundwork
After the May 1945 end of World War II in Germany, the US initiated Operation Paperclip to collect a number of scientists and engineers who had been at the center of Nazi Germany's advanced military technologies.
“Marshall Space Flight Center” enters the record as rocketry and spacecraft propulsion research center. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Marshall, Space and Flight can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Marshall Space Flight Center” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.