[flickr-photo:id=2064886297,size=m, style=float:right; clear:right;padding-right:2em;]I had a chance to tour the Kennedy Space Center just before Thanksgiving, and was able to provide input and ideas in pursuit of an updated CAPPS contract for NASA's new Constellation program. The completion of the $130B International Space Station's construction is in sight, and is expected by 2010. Unfortunately, the originally planned life of the station only envisioned operational support through 2016, so the ISS's long-term role and cost-effectiveness for scientific research is uncertain, and has been significantly reduced from original plans.

The tour involved visits to a number of locations, listed below. You can access the corresponding links to browse thumbnails of all the images I took. From those thumbnails, you can then click on any individual image to gain access to the full-size images, and get more detailed explanations about each of the photos that I've uploaded. The collections are of:

• the Kennedy Space Center Administration building (including mockups of space station components, and a viewing of pre-launch ISS component testing)
• the Orbiter Processing Facility (where the shuttle's 'pit crew' is located)
• the Vehicle Assembly Building (where the shuttle gets re-stacked on the Crawler-transporter
• Launch Complex 39-B (we tried to get on Launch Complex 39-a while we were there, but it was closed to public access for safety reasons)
• Fish camp and airboat ride

I also used this opportunity to make my first attempt at geotagging. As a result, you can also jump from these images in Flickr to the corresponding Yahoo Maps location, for a birds eye view of what we saw.

I was a bit disappointed that the tour did not allow us to see either the buildup of the shuttle in the Vehicle Assembly Building, or get a closeup to the Endeavor at Launch Pad 39-A. However, I've discovered that photo collections for both situations exist in Microsoft Research's Photosynth project (technology which I've previously written about). These collections are not to be missed, and highlights the potential applications of GPS tagging. If you open any of these collections, be sure to be patient to allow the full resolution to be built over the network, and see what happens as you 'zoom in', or click on different camera angles:

• Vehicle Assembly Building (outside)
• Inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (mating Endeavor to it's external fuel tanks)
• Endeavor on Launch Pad 39-A
• Endeavor tiles (from in-orbit photographs)
• De-mating the Atlantis from a 747

Since my photos are now on Flickr (and in the public domain) they theoretically could also be added to this single source of image data, though the geotagging I did will likely not be sufficiently accurate to be useful. With that in mind, my own next steps for future geotagging efforts will involve using a GPS logger and RoboGEO to automatically associate GPS information captured on my PDA with photographs (using the timestamping common to each). This process provides for a painless determination of the exact location for each individual picture, rather than doing this for a group of photographs based upon manual map placements, as I did for the shooting last week.

A transition is underway within NASA and at the Kennedy Space Center from Space Shuttle-based operations to Orion-based low-earth orbit, lunar, and Mars missions. With dynamic efforts such as the Google Lunar X Prize and SpaceX, we certainly can expect to see plenty of new thinking and energy. The imminent launch of the Columbia laboratory will definitely help enhance research capabilities, and solar system risk management may increase interest even more! For an interesting analysis of the challenges of value management on the space program, see When Physics, Economics, and Reality Collide. To get a sense of the challenges of these missions, review the shuttle mission scenarios.

I can't help but feel a strong sense of national (and company) pride after this tour, since this clearly remains one of our greatest engineering acccomplishments!