The
Redstone Arsenal was founded in
Huntsville, AL in the early 1940s as an ordnance shell loading and assembly plant. Its focus shifted in the following years, with its research programs in
missiles in
rocketry.
Wernher von Braun spent many years there doing development in
rocketry for the
Army and later for
NASA.
NASA's
Marshall Space Flight Center was established in 1960 on the Arsenal and is where the development of the
Saturn rockets for the
Apollo program took place.
The Arsenal is still very much used today for ordnance and missile testing, much to the window-shattering chagrin of the upper-middle class who have bought houses on the cotton-fields-turned-neighborhoods directly adjacent to the Arsenal. The Arsenal is host to the US Army Missile Command (AMCOM) and the Missile and Space Intelligence Center (MSIC), as well as the fantastic technical library at the Redstone Scientific Information Center (RSIC).