NASA is famous for sending rockets up into space. But this past weekend in Huntsville, it took down a piece of its history in a spectacular way.

Building 4200, the Marshall Space Flight Center’s administrative headquarters from 1963 until 2020, came down in a cloud of dust following an implosion Oct. 29. The demise of Building 4200, where NASA housed every Marshall center director, including its first, Wernher von Braun, makes 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,” the agency said.

The 11-story, curtain-wall structure was designed by the Fort Worth, Texas, architectural firm Wyatt C. Hendrick and completed in 1963. Following the Marshall Center’s formal establishment on July 1, 1960, the new NASA center found itself in desperate need of office space.

Von Braun enlisted the help of Alabama’s U.S. Sen. Lister Hill and Rep. Robert E. Jones in gaining an appropriation from Congress for the facility. In a letter to von Braun dated July 7, 1960, Hill stated how glad he was that funding for the “badly needed” building was made available.

As part of NASA’s “repair-by-replacement” approach – tearing down costly old structures and replacing them with energy-efficient new facilities – Building 4200 had been in line for an update in 2030, the agency said. But that schedule was accelerated in 2020 when Marshall engineers identified structural issues in the building’s exterior wall panels. Given the age of the structure and the prohibitive cost of repairing and maintaining it, NASA chose to deactivate and close 4200.

(Courtesy of Alabama NewsCenter)