Military hardware grown into the earth, Huntsville, AL

Slowly, the earth grows up around the feet of the missile launchers in the rocket garden. Feels like it should be a heavy-handed metaphor, but I just like the imagery and the reminder of elapsing time.

SR-71, US Space & Rocket Museum, Huntsville, AL

Another remarkably sleek and sinister piece of military hardware: an SR-71 spy-plane, rusting quietly near the front gate of the museum.

Vietnam-era military helicopter interior, Huntsville, AL

Unlike the NASA exhibitions at Kennedy Space Center, the Huntsville museum is quite comfortable with the military aspects of air and space, and its exhibits also include a number of weapons systems, even some with no particular relationship to rocketry like this Chinook transport helicopter.

Huntsville Rocket Garden

The main rocket garden at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, including a Saturn I (the larger one on the left) and various Mercury and Juno rockets. The biggest of the lot, a Saturn V visible from many miles distant on the highway, is off in its own separate location.

Rocket power, Huntsville, AL

The sheer size of the rocket nozzles on the external shuttle boosters is amazing to me: each of those nozzles is taller than a person.

Shuttle Stack, Huntsville, AL

This collection of genuine NASA artifacts is a bit of a funny mixture. The booster and main tank are real enough, recovered from actual missions, but if you look carefully at the shuttle you may notice that it looks rather fake. That's because it is the Space Shuttle Pathfinder, a genuine NASA wooden mockup, carefully built to the same size, weight, and shape as the actual shuttles and used for testing shuttle-handling and launch facilities. It didn't originally looks this pretty, but has been given cosmetic improvements to fit its afterlife role as celebrity impersonator.

Shuttle stack through the trees, Huntsville, AL

In the rocket garden of the US Space and Rocket Museum in Huntsville, Alabama, a dramatic corridor leads you from to upright Atlas and Mercury rockets to their mounted space shuttle stack.