 Before the Saturn V rocket successfully launched Americans to the moon, its tremendously powerful first stage was proven during testing here at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. That was two decades ago, but soon the roar of rocket engines will echo again from this massive concrete and steel test stand. This historic site has now been restored into a hotbed of rocket engine research for the future. It's called the Technology Testbed, and it will give NASA engineers a chance to test theories and hardware aimed at improving the space shuttle main engine and the engines that will follow. The first thing it's going to do is give us a much better understanding of what's happening inside the engine. John McCarty is the director of the propulsion lab here at the Marshall Center. He points out that on standard flight models of the shuttle engine, there are 50 sensors. On the test engine here, there can be more than 12 times that many. The data generated during these tests will be used to improve the engines that will propel the nation's space program for decades to come. The bottom line is going to be a reduction in the cost of the engines, but I project at least 50%, along with increased safety and reliability. McCarty says that building a new test facility would have cost 10 times as much as refurbishing this one. Soon this artifact of the past, which helped put man on the moon, will roar back to life. It helped NASA make man flights safe and reliable far into the future. Well, I think if we look off 5 to 10 years into the future, we would expect that we could see engines that are 50% of the cost of these current engines that are safer and have higher reliability than what we have today. And that's the whole thrust of the program is to reduce the opportunity for something to go wrong.