Huntsville and the Space Race: How a Small Alabama Town Put People on the Moon

Erich von Däniken's 1968 classic "Chariots of the Gods" described Huntsville in the 1950s as a sleepy town in the middle of nowhere in Alabama, where the residents scurried around nervously when they heard rockets being tested, until they wisely learned to carry around earplugs. And so it was in the 50s, when the Germans first came to town.

After World War II, the government got custody of several rocket scientists who had been working for the Nazis. Most people believed that they were forced to work for the Nazis, and most of them probably were. A brilliant rocket scientist living under the fuehrer's nose would be a lot of temptation, and not many people told the Nazis 'no' and got away with it. There is still some controversy over the so called "deal with the devil," as Fox Mulder once called it, that got these scientists for the U.S., but for our purposes, let's suppose that all of them were captive in Nazi Germany and were happy to be taken to America. Werner Von Braun actually arranged the surrender of his team of rocket scientists to the U.S. Army at the end of the war. Whether that was because they were losing or because they saw an opportunity to escape we may never know.

Von Braun was by far the most famous of the German contingent, but there were several other prominent scientists among them, such as Ernst Stuhlinger, another of the rare scientists that were known by name by the public. In all, there were about 100 scientists imported into Huntsville in 1950 to start the space race, building ever bigger and faster rockets, planning moon missions, and eventually, the space shuttle program. The space shuttle program is still run through Huntsville's NASA headquarters, as is much of the international space station. Because the moon missions were devised by these scientists, there are license plates available that say "First on the Moon" to commemorate Huntsville's crowning achievement.

Huntsville's heroes are still lauded in namesake buildings, and their legacies are all around us. Besides the space trade, the Germans also brought much needed culture into this part of the world. They started a symphony, a theater, and a ballet company, according to Homer Hickam, author of October Sky and another famous rocket scientist now living in Huntsville.

The build-up of Huntsville happened at lightning pace- that sleepy cotton town of 10,000 now has a metropolitan population of 367,000, and grows by the day. One in 13 people in Huntsville is now an engineer, the average salary is well above the national average, and the populace holds more degrees than the average American. The public schools are consistently ranked some of the best in the Southeast, have half the dropout rate of schools in the rest of the state, and have higher than average test scores. All of this is due, to this day, to the Germans. NASA is a firm part of this community now, with more than $820 million being pumped into Alabama by NASA alone, and that doesn't include the countless R & D facilities in the country's second largest research park (second only the Washington, D.C.). The U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville is the largest space museum in the world, attracting tourists from all over the world to see some of the most breathtaking technology ever devised.

It's a startling picture for people who know little about the South or about Alabama, who expect it to be full of cotton fields instead of rockets and Thai restaurants. But what does it really mean for Huntsvillians? For one thing, it means that we are in large part adrift on an island of our own. We have little in common with the rest of the state, and don't really want to. Those who grew up in Huntsville had no idea what the rest of South was really like, believing it was all like Huntsville, and were disappointed at some point upon finding out that it was not. Huntsville continues to expand outward, and towns that once seemed far away are now suburbs trapped in the midst of the sprawl. There is no place that is quite like Huntsville, also known as The Rocket City, with its emphasis on science, and its lack of constant politics, like D.C. It is still an island adrift, and most people in Huntsville are happy to keep it that way.