Early on Oct. 29, NASA in Huntsville will demolish the historic former headquarters building where Wernher von Braun’s team designed the rocket that took America to the moon.
Building 4200 on Redstone Arsenal will be leveled at 7:30 a.m. “to make way for a series of new, state-of-the-art facilities tailored to help NASA map out the next century’s worth of discoveries in space,” writer Rick Smith said on the agency’s website. Smith, a Manufacturing Technical Solutions employee, supports Marshall’s Office of Strategic Analysis & Communications.
NASA is not planning a gathering to watch the demolition, which should be over in seconds due to the earlier removal of most of its interior. The complex and surrounding parking lots are already closed and will remain closed after the demolition until Nov. 1, NASA said.
However, the implosion will be live-streamed that Saturday morning on Marshall’s website.
The building is largely stripped to its beams but it had been full of 1960s-era offices and conference rooms – and asbestos. A common insulating material when 4200 was built in the early 1960s, asbestos is toxic if disturbed and inhaled. NASA says entire floors would have needed to be shut down and sealed off for every improvement such as new computer cables.
This image is closer to how NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center looks today before its planned demolition. The building has been stripped of virtually everything but its skeleton.
“That decision tugs a lot of heartstrings here,” Smith said in the Marshall story. “The building was home to thousands of Marshall team members over much of six decades.”
Fourteen directors including von Braun led Marshall from this building. The moon rockets and space shuttles, the James Webb Space Telescope and its predecessors and successors, and the International Space Station were all built, tested or managed by Marshall.
It was routine for astronauts back from space to visit Marshall and sit onstage in Building 4200′s auditorium talking about their missions and answering questions from the people who helped build their rides. Moonwalkers walked the building’s halls, and the central atrium was where Marshall team members met each year for solemn Day of Remembrance ceremonies honoring astronauts lost in the space program.
Now, Marshall is putting new technology, energy saving materials and more open floor plans into a complex of modern buildings in the same general area. The vision is “a bustling, modern campus atmosphere, loosely centralized around the evolving 4200 complex and its counterpart to the south, the 4600 engineering complex,” Smith said in the NASA story. A greenway connecting the two will encourage walking from complex to complex.
“Buildings come down, but science and exploration continue onward,” said Marshall Director Jody Singer. “Marshall’s true legacy isn’t a glass and stone edifice, but the men and women who work within – the vanguard of future space frontier expansion for untold decades to come.”
Marshall’s historical preservation officer Scott Worley agreed in his own post. “If we had a choice between innovating an aging building or funding a bold new mission to the outer planets, we’d pick the mission every time,” Worley said.
As for von Braun’s legacy, items from his Marshall office and other memorabilia are displayed at the nearby U.S. Space & Rocket Center, which serves as Marshall’s official visitor center.