You are hereSpace age with a Southern Twist - Huntsville, AL
Space age with a Southern Twist - Huntsville, AL
If Huntsville were a lady, she would be a slow-talking Southern belle dressed in a space suit, sipping sweet iced tea while she trained for the next space shuttle mission.
The Old South and rocket ships have been a happy if incongruous mix in Huntsville since a German scientist named Wernher von Braun arrived in the 1950s and developed rockets that sent man into space and to the moon and in the process, turned the city into an Alabama anomaly.
Although the state constitution was written there, Huntsville was deemed too far north to be the state capital. That’s worked out just fine. Now a city of 160,000 with a county population of around 350,000, Huntsville instead became a capital of aerospace and military operations. It is a base for NASA, the U.S. Army and myriad firms that supply and support them.
As other cities in the state struggle, Huntsville soldiers on, fueled by Redstone Arsenal, an Army installation that employs 14,000 and will add another 5,000 workers over the next few years, and Cummings Research Park, one of the largest research parks in the country. More than 40 Fortune 500 companies have a presence in the city, according to the Huntsville/Madison County Convention and Visitors Bureau.
In terms of an economic base, “we used to have government and military and that was it,” said the CVB’s marketing director, Charles Winters. “Now our economy is more multilayered.”