THE GOVERNMENT AND ITS CONTRACTORS have a long tradition of abandoning facilities that no longer serve them, but generally the sites are cleaned of anything of interest leaving starkly empty buildings to rot.However at the Aerojet-Dade Rocket Facility, they decided to just leave their giant rocket where it was. Located in the middle of 25,000 acres of land purchased by the Aerojet company in the early 1960’s, the test site was developed to experiment with various types of rocket fuel with which to get humans into space. Two rocket silos were built into the ground and during its operating life, the complex tested three different rocket types at full-burn. These static tests gauged the effectiveness of solid rocket fuel, the last test rocket being the largest solid-fuel rocket ever built. This last test saw the release of hydrochloric acids across the surrounding crops and wetlands, making the facility less than popular among the locals.

In 1957, Sputnik was launched, being the first human-made object to orbit the Earth; an event that sparked a space race of who can get to the moon first, between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1963, the U.S. Air Force gave Aerojet General, a major rocket and missile propulsion manufacturer, $3 million to start construction of a manufacturing and testing site in Homestead.