A rocket garden 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.[1]
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,[2] 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.
