In 1963, Aerojet General was given a $3 million contract from the U.S. Air Force to build a manufacturing and testing site for rockets that would send astronauts to the moon. The plant was constructed in the center of Florida’s Everglades in the town of Homestead. Beneath a large metal shed, a 150-foot deep silo housed the largest solid-fuel rocket motor ever built. The rocket was tested three times between 1965 and 1967.
>via A Giant, Un-Used NASA Rocket Has Been Sitting Underground For 50 Years – Mandatory.
A nice photoessay – we abandoned the solids for liquid-fuel engines to go to the moon. Thanks to reader Trevor for the linky.
Craig Swain
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:-)
We went with liquids because the solids were so damn hard to control, IIRC. Witness the Challenger SRB explosion.
Challenger wasn’t cased so much by the SRBs being solid rockets as their tendency to shoot jets of flame in random directions while being strapped next to umpty-illion gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen.
Can you imagine what an archaeologist might say about this a thousand years from now?
Probably that Freud was right ;)