Rocket garden

A rocket garden or rocket park is a display of missiles, sounding rockets, or space launch vehicles, usually in an outdoor setting. The proper form of the term usually refers to the Rocket Garden at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

All rockets that have flown so far are at least partially expendable (in some rockets, certain stages or boosters get reused), so rockets in displays have not been flown. As in the case of the Saturn V, later planned missions were cancelled, leaving unneeded rockets for the museums. For displays of early American space hardware, such as Project Mercury and Project Gemini, surplus missiles have been painted to look like crewed space launch vehicles. Engineering test articles (such as the Space Shuttle Pathfinder stack in Huntsville) or purpose-built full-scale replicas are also displayed in rocket gardens.

Examples

Europe

Musée de l'air et de l'espace, Le Bourget, France
Historical Technical Museum, Peenemünde, Germany

North America

U.S. Space & Rocket Center, Huntsville, Alabama
Air Force Space and Missile Museum, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Cape Canaveral, Florida
Kennedy Space Center, Merritt Island, Florida
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
New Mexico Museum of Space History, Alamogordo, New Mexico
National Museum of Nuclear Science & History, Albuquerque, New Mexico
White Sands Missile Range, near Las Cruces, New Mexico
1964 New York World's Fairgrounds, Flushing Meadows Park, New York; now the New York Hall of Science
National Museum of the United States Air Force, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio
Fort Sill, Lawton, Oklahoma
SpaceX Starbase, Boca Chica, Texas
Space Center Houston, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas
Thiokol, near Promontory, Utah
Air Power Park, Hampton, Virginia
Wallops Flight Facility Visitor Center, Wallops Island, Virginia
National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C. (indoors)
Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, Cheyenne, Wyoming