Marshall Space Flight Center

Marshall Space Flight Center

The George C. Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) is the U.S. government's civilian rocketry and spacecraft propulsion research center. The largest center of NASA, MSFC's first mission was developing the Saturn launch vehicles for the Apollo moon program. Marshall is today the agency's lead center for Space Shuttle propulsion and its external tank; payloads and related crew training; International Space Station (ISS) design and assembly; and computers, networks, and information management. Located on the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, MSFC is named in honor of General of the Army George Marshall.

The center also contains the Huntsville Operations Support Center (HOSC), a facility that supports Space Shuttle launch, payload and experiment activities at the Kennedy Space Center, ISS launch and experiment operations. The HOSC also monitors rocket launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station when a Marshall Center payload is on board.

Read more about Marshall Space Flight Center:  History, Capabilities and Projects, Directors

Famous quotes containing the words marshall, space, flight and/or center:

    Night comes to the room of the world

    —Frank Marshall Davis (b. 1905)

    Art and power will go on as they have done,—will make day out of night, time out of space, and space out of time.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create “one world.” Instead of one world, we have “star wars,” and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.
    Gore Vidal (b. 1925)

    Placing the extraordinary at the center of the ordinary, as realism does, is a great comfort to us stay-at-homes.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)