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:
“Let us not succumb to nature. We will marshall the clouds and restrain tempests; we will bottle up pestilent exhalations; we will probe for earthquakes, grub them up, and give vent to the dangerous gas; we will disembowel the volcano, and extract its poison, take its seed out. We will wash water, and warm fire, and cool ice, and underprop the earth. We will teach birds to fly, and fishes to swim, and ruminants to chew the cud. It is time we looked into these things.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The flattering, if arbitrary, label, First Lady of the Theatre, takes its toll. The demands are great, not only in energy but eventually in dramatic focus. It is difficult, if not impossible, for a star to occupy an inch of space without bursting seams, cramping everyone else’s style and unbalancing a play. No matter how self-effacing a famous player may be, he makes an entrance as a casual neighbor and the audience interest shifts to the house next door.”
—Helen Hayes (1900–1993)
“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)
“Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.”
—Thomas Merton (1915–1968)