Okay ladies and gentlemen,
we're on our way to the abandoned Aerojet Rocket Factory here
in the Florida Everglades.
Right now I'm headed you could say South West bound
on Highway 9336
and we're coming up on SW 232nd Ave.
which is going to be right here.
And hopefully it is opened...
Ah man! okay
Yeah, this is used right now by the
South Florida Water Management District
It's rarely opened.
As you can see, there's one of their trucks right there.
So what I'm going to do is, a couple of years ago I came
when this road was still accessible
And I took some pictures
So I'm going to go ahead and share them with you guys.
In the 1950s, the USSR
was one of 2 super powers in this world.
and in 1957 they launched
Sputnik, the first
man made object to orbit the earth.
Then in 1962, they planted missiles
in Cuba
which did not make the US happy.
These are going to be space images taken
of all the missiles put in Cuba so
the US realized they had to do something to counteract this measure.
But then in 1963,
the United States Air Force gave Aerojet
a major rocket and missile manufacturer,
$3 Million to create this test site
and manufacturing site in Homestead.
Here we see there's 6 compounds. They even
built a canal
so they could transport the missiles by barge
up the canal which was the only way
that they could be transported. They even had to
build a drawbridge over US 1
So they could be transported and vehicular traffic could open.
This was a picture of the drawbridge
There you see the bridge tender's house.
This is a picture of the drawbridge when it was in existence; they knocked it down like in 2008.
I was there and you could see the bridge tender's house on your right there.
Here's the first compound.
You see a tree growing on the roof.
That's how old it's been there.
This place is full of alligators and panthers
I luckily didn't encounter any, but yeah
they do live in these areas.
It's all surrounded by Everglades.
There's actually a rocket still in the ground at this site. There it is.
That rocket is still there as we speak.
If you go, you can see this rocket.
I promise you.
This is one of the compounds, I don't know. There's no
signs. There's barely
any signs there so I don't know
what exactly they did in this one.
But yeah here's one
Here is another one, this one
seems like it was used for storage with the
you could see the big rusted barn doors
on the side.
And here you could see that there's no
walls left. Just the partitions
and some insulation on the far
wall there on the back.
This is another shot of the rocket that still in the ground.
Scary that
thing is still there as we speak.
if it fell into the wrong hands...
This is a hallway
I'm guessing that was like research and developments rooms.
on either side.
I don't know what this is, this could've been storage as well.
There you see a meter off to your left.
and how the dirt has accumulated over the years.
and the rust on the walls.
You can see trees growing on that wall. Those trees
have been there for decades I'm guessing.
This yeah, this place got
abandoned I think it was in
1969 when NASA
decided to go with liquid fueled engines
so then the
all the workers here got laid off
and that caused the abandonment of the facility.
But between 1965 and 1967
You had multiple test firings done
One of them was at night
There was one you could even see from Miami which was 60 miles away!
It produced over 3 million pounds of thrust.
One problem though was
near the burnout phase
the rocket nozzle was ejected
causing the propellant made of hydrochloric acid to be
spread across the wetlands and the everglades
and crop fields in Homestead
So many of the residents complained
about the damage which included
paint to their cars and killing
thousands of dollars worth of crops.
So that could have been a big issue in the abandonment
of this plant.
All the side effects it caused.
After the abandonment, Aerojet
sued the State of Florida
and sold most of its land to the South Dade Land Corporation for $6 Million.
After many unsuccessful attempts to use
the land for farming
it was sold off again to the State
of Florida for $12 Million.
This here is the parking lot. That's what you see when you first go in.
And then
Aerojet would later trade
it's remaining 5,100 acres in South Florida for
5,500 acres in New Mexico.
This is still there as well.
Please subscribe or like! I hope you enjoyed the video guys.
Take care. Over and out.
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