What happened Thursday at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, while ceremonial, intends to preserve Huntsville’s rocket history for future generations.

This reality should not be overlooked, said Rick Chappell, a former NASA astronaut and associate director for science as Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

“Humans have been on Earth for about 200,000 years,” Chappell said. “And we get to live in the few decades in which the rockets, the machines, the spacecraft have been made and allow humans to leave the earth and live off the earth and go to the moon, and hopefully soon to other planets. And the rockets that are here were built by space explorers who came to Huntsville from all over the world. It just started with an almost nobody here. And these folks came, and they have made what’s what we now find.”

Related: U.S. Space & Rocket Center soars as Huntsville’s top attraction

And so it is that the rocket center formally broke ground on a new rocket park, one intended to paint the picture described by Chappell of the significance of that rocket history in Huntsville and applaud those who worked to make it happen.

It’s a $7.9 million project, according to rocket center CEO Kimberly Robinson, to build a new home worthy of preserving that history.

As Chappell described it, “It’s a wonderful day to be in this place, which is really the hall of fame for America’s rocketry.”

That hall of fame and all of its history, ever evolving with NASA’s new missions, will include a piece of the present as well. In addition to past rockets that had previously populated the original rocket park, the rocket center announced Thursday that a section of the SLS Core Stage Pathfinder, a mock-up that matches the size, weight, and center of gravity of the Space Launch System that is managed by Marshall Space Flight Center.

The Pathfinder was used at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and other NASA centers to practice handling an actual vehicle. The rocket center said the segment will illustrate the massive size of the SLS launch vehicle and help tell the story of the Rocket City’s current and ongoing role in space exploration.

Joining the rockets will be the Marshall Retirees Association’s Space Exploration Memorial. The memorial wall will include the names of thousands of Huntsville-area people who have supported space exploration as employees at Marshall and companies that work with NASA.

Tying it all together will be a garden-like, “guest-friendly” setting that will also include an amphitheater for educational classes.

Robinson also noted that Fred Luddy, a Space Camp parent from California, donated $500,000 to the project.

The rockets that will return to the new rocket park were removed in 2018 and have been undergoing restoration themselves at Cosmos Aerospace in Cullman. Those rockets, in place prior to the opening of the rocket center in 1970, are U.S. Army Redstone, Jupiter, Jupiter-C, Juno II, and Mercury-Redstone rockets.

“We are now ready to re-erect these beautifully refurbished rockets,” Robinson said. “Over the course of the next year, this entire area will be transformed as we create a park-like atmosphere for our museum visitors, our Space Camp trainees and the community. We will have a place to learn how Huntsville charted the way to the moon and how it is doing so again today.

“We will have landscaping to make this a greener, more aesthetically pleasing place. We will have an amphitheater for an outdoor classroom, and the whole area will be a place where our community can hold events. And we’ll recognize the work of the people behind NASA’s achievements in space with the space exploration memorial.”