Huntsville, Alabama

Huntsville is a city in Alabama. It is the county seat of Madison County and is the state's largest city. It was originally settled by John Hunt and named by him Twickenham after the town in England where the poet Alexander Pope, whom Hunt greatly admired, had his home. During the 1812-14 War the city, which had become the first incorporated municipality in the state, was renamed Huntsville after its founder. The city thrived from the cotton industry during the nineteenth century, but it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the city became more well-known.

With the onset of World War II, the city was chosen as the location of Redstone Arsenal, a military base. After the war, captured Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun was brought to the base to work at the Marshall Space Flight Center and develop what would become NASA. Due to its history of involvement with the US space program, the city has been nicknamed "Rocket City", for which it has been famous ever since.

Redstone Arsenal (located outside the city proper) is home to many organizational units of the United States Army and other components of the Department of War, along with NASA and the FBI. It is long rumored that, should President Donald Trump succeed in moving agencies' headquarters from the Washington, DC area, that Huntsville would be a probable location for the FBI. In September 2025 it was named as the home of the United States Space Command (it was the original planned location during the first Trump Administration, only to have the Command move to outside Denver during the Biden Administration).