19601776 Club
Eisenhower dedicates NASA's new rocket center in Huntsville
The facility had already been running for two months under a name honoring a five-star general who never flew a rocket.
Huntsville, Alabama, had spent fifteen years building missiles for the Army at Redstone Arsenal. On September 8, 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stood before a crowd there and formally dedicated the Marshall Space Flight Center, named for General of the Army George C. Marshall. NASA had quietly activated the center two months earlier, on July 1, absorbing the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and its rocket team. Eisenhower's ceremony made official what engineers in Huntsville already knew: their work now belonged to the space agency, not the Army…
