Huntsville

Huntsville is a city in northern Alabama, in the valley of the Tennessee River at the foot of the Appalachian foothills. Called the Rocket City, it is where the Saturn V rocket that carried astronauts to the Moon was designed.

John Hunt, a settler from Virginia, built a cabin beside the Big Spring in 1805, and the town that grew there took his name. The constitutional convention of Alabama met in the town in 1819, and it was briefly the state capital. Cotton mills made Huntsville a textile town in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the 1950s Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket engineers moved to the city, and the Marshall Space Flight Center of NASA opened there in the following decade.

The Marshall Space Flight Center develops rockets and propulsion systems, among them the Space Launch System. Blue Origin builds its BE-4 rocket engines at a plant in the city. Mazda Toyota Manufacturing makes cars such as the Toyota Corolla Cross at its plant in Huntsville, and Adtran, also based there, makes equipment for telecommunications networks.

The US Space and Rocket Center displays a Saturn V rocket in a long hall and runs Space Camp, where children and adults train like astronauts. Big Spring Park, in the center, surrounds the spring with lawns, bridges and a pond of koi. The Twickenham Historic District keeps houses of the early 19th century built for cotton planters and merchants. The Huntsville Botanical Garden has a butterfly house and a children's garden. On Monte Sano, the mountain above the city, Burritt on the Mountain keeps a mansion and old farm buildings with views over the valley.