NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center has more than six decades of history designing, building and testing a storied series of rockets, rocket engines and instruments to fly in space. The center’s accomplishments include the Redstone rocket used to launch Project Mercury, the Saturn rockets for the Apollo program, the Skylab space station, and the Hubble Space Telescope. Marshall is located on the grounds of the U.S. Army Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, a city in northern Alabama about 145 miles (233 kilometers) northwest of Atlanta, Georgia. The NASA Center employs nearly 6,000 people, according to its official NASA website. Marshall also manages NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans, where giant rocket stages can be built and loaded onto barges for transportation to launch facilities at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.