On May 18, 1976, the visitors center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, opened to the public. Intended to fulfill NASA’s mission of sharing its work to inspire and educate, the facility was a renovated Bureau of Standards radio station turned NASA maintenance storage building. It opened with great pageantry, including breaking a ribbon (rather than a traditional ribbon cutting) in a reenactment of Robert Goddard’s first rocket launch.
The early visitors center was largely open air, and featured displays on long-distance communication, the structure of the solar system, and Robert Goddard himself. It also was home to a meteorology station. Renovations over the years since have added multimedia experiences, replicas of spacecraft including the space shuttle and a James Webb Space Telescope mirror, and art installations created from imagery captured by observatories including Hubble and the Solar Dynamics Observatory. A 100-foot-tall Delta-B rocket that was displayed on the grounds when the visitors center opened remains there today, as does the sycamore tree grown from a seed that went to the Moon on Apollo 14 and planted at Goddard in 1977.
