The quarterly meeting of the Limestone County Historical Society will be held Sunday afternoon, Jan. 28, in the Rogers Center of Athens First Presbyterian Church. Refreshments will be served at 2:30 p.m. with the meeting to follow at 3:00. The program will feature Ed Stewart, curator at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center (USSRC). He will give an overview of NASA’s Saturn program, tell about the removal of the Saturn rocket from the Alabama Welcome Center and share the status of a replacement exhibit.

Ed is a lifelong space enthusiast whose earliest memories are of the Skylab space station and early Space Shuttle launches. He couldn’t become an astronaut, but he continued to pursue his passion for space exploration as a hobby while attending college at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

Ed joined the USSRC as a Space Camp crew trainer in 2001 and became part of the Briefing Staff, sharing his knowledge with trainees of all ages. He worked in the center’s education department for three years, revamping the historical and technical curriculum for Space Camp logbooks and briefings. He then managed Space Camp Corporate Programs, developing mission simulation scenarios based on historical examples from NASA missions.

In 2011, Ed became the curator for the center. He developed exhibitions of various sizes and topics, from a biography of Dr. Wernher von Braun to the influence of the U.S. space program on American popular culture. After a break from 2019 to 2023 to support his spouse’s career, he returned to the center as a curator and is responsible for the care, organization, and sharing of the center’s world-class collection of archives and artifacts.