‘Rocket City’ lukewarm toward new missions

By Jay Reeves

updated 6:17 p.m. ET April 22, 2008

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - During the space race, engineers such as German scientist Wernher von Braun were treated like celebrities in this former cotton town nicknamed "Rocket City" because it is where the nation's first moon rockets were designed.

Four decades later, the Huntsville phone book still lists 37 businesses with "rocket" in their name, including a motorcycle dealer, a chiropractor and a meat processor.

Yet NASA's mission to return astronauts to the moon — and eventually send them to Mars — has attracted little public interest here, despite the fact that Huntsville engineers are developing the next generation of rockets for the project, which could create as many as 2,900 jobs in the city within five years.

"In the '60s and '70s, it was exciting. Everyone had space fever," recalled Polly Morton, a longtime resident who works with the city's tourism bureau.

These days, she said, plans to explore the heavens are overshadowed by more immediate earthly concerns — like the war in Iraq and concerns about whether the government will have the money to complete the $100 billion Constellation program that began in 2005.

"Mars is the next thing," Morton said. "But right now, because of the war and the funding, it's not talked about as much."

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The Constellation program aims to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020 aboard a new rocket called Ares that will replace the space shuttle fleet after it's retired in 2010. The first test flight for an Ares prototype is just a year away.

But the project has hardly captured the public's imagination the way the race to the moon did in the 1960s, when Huntsville was growing into a rocketry center. NASA acknowledges that the slower development of Constellation bears little resemblance to the frenetic, wide-open competition against the Soviet Union.

"It was a very different time. The Cold War was raging, and it was all new," said Steve Cook, manager of the Ares project office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. "Today we are focused on sustainable, long-term exploration."

Momentum is building for the project as spending and hiring increases, Cook said, but it's hard to compete with memories of the legendary Apollo era.

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