Kennedy Space Center

From LAX, Delta, American, United and Virgin America offer nonstop service to Orlando, Fla.; US Airways and Southwest offer direct service (stop, no change of planes) and Continental and Southwest offer connecting service (change of planes). Restricted round-trip fares begin at $298. Kennedy Space Center is about 60 miles from Orlando. THINGS TO DO Kennedy Space Center, http://www.kennedyspacecenter.com . 9 a.m.- 6 p.m. daily except Christmas and certain launch days.

ORLANDO, Fla. - Does anyone need a 15,000-foot landing strip? How about a place to assemble rocket ships? Or a parachute-packing plant? A launchpad? Make us an offer, says NASA, which is quietly holding a going-out-of-business sale for the facilities used by its space shuttle program. The last shuttle flight was in July 2011, when Atlantis made its final touchdown. That orbiter, like its sisters Discovery and Endeavour, is now a museum piece . As soon as some remaining cleanup is finished at Kennedy Space Center, the shuttle program will be history.

Jay Honeycutt, chief of space shuttle operations at the Kennedy Space Center, has been named director of the center. Honeycutt, a 57-year-old manger with no spaceflight experience, succeeds Robert L. Crippen.

Granted, moving Atlantis, the last of the retired space shuttles, won't be as difficult as Endeavour's recent, and tortuous, trip through Los Angeles. That journey required the chopping down of hundreds of trees - and Endeavour arrived 16 hours behind schedule Still, moving Atlantis 9.8 miles will be no piece of cake. “You're talking about 165,000 pounds, a national treasure, a priceless artifact.... No pressure," said Tim Macy, director of project development and construction for Delaware North Cos., which operates the Kennedy Space Center visitors complex in Florida.

Veteran space official James W. Kennedy was named director of Kennedy Space Center as NASA prepares to return the shuttle fleet to flight after the Columbia disaster in February. He succeeds Gen. Roy Bridges, who was appointed to lead NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia earlier this month. Kennedy first came to NASA in 1968 in the space center's aerospace engineering cooperative education program. He rejoined the agency in 1980 as a project engineer for the shuttle.

PCO Inc. in Chatsworth won a contract to provide the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with equipment to transmit video, audio and data signals over NASA's fiber-optic communications lines. PCO, a unit of Corning Glass Works, said its initial contract calls for the installation of 300 units at the Kennedy Space Center. PCO's equipment would give NASA the ability to transmit up to 300 different signals simultaneously.

Visitors to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex now must pay to see the formerly free Rocket Garden (containing rockets used by NASA over four decades) and a full-size replica of a space shuttle orbiter. Under the center's new price structure, adults pay $24 and children ages 3 to 11 pay $15 for entry to the complex. Previously, adults paid $14 to $26, depending on which attractions they visited.

Student painters from an Eastside academy will watch NASA officials unveil their mural today at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The artists are part of the "Mars Mural Project," an educational outreach program by NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Academia de Arte Yepes, the nonprofit art academy that they attend.

Richard G. Smith, director of the Kennedy Space Center and one of the officials who approved the ill-fated launch of the space shuttle Challenger, announced his retirement today. He is the second director of a major space center to quit in the shake-up following the shuttle disaster. Smith, who has been in the space program for more than 35 years, will become president and chief executive of General Space Corp. of Pittsburgh, a NASA announcement said.

The Kennedy Space Center, faced with a possible shuttle launch delay of one year, today announced plans to reduce its 16,000-person work force by 1,100 jobs. Deputy director Thomas Utsman said 450 of those cuts are directly related to the Challenger launch disaster that forced the grounding of the three remaining shuttles. He said some of those cuts will be made by attrition and transfers, but he said layoffs will be necessary.

NASA has delayed the space shuttle Endeavour's departure for Los Angeles by 24 hours because of a threat of stormy weather along its flight path, officials announced Sunday. Endeavour, which is scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles on Thursday, will now take off around sunrise Tuesday. It will still arrive in L.A. on schedule - its pit stop in Houston will be shortened to a day. Once it arrives, it will be driven through the streets of Los Angeles to its final destination, the California Science Center.

Before the space shuttle Endeavour glides into retirement at the California Science Center, the spacecraft will take one last spin in the air, flying over a good chunk of California. NASA released new details Friday of low-level photo-op flyovers Endeavour will make before its scheduled Sept. 20 landing at Los Angeles International Airport. That morning, Endeavour will leave Edwards Air Force Base atop its 747 transport aircraft and head north to the Bay Area. There, the shuttle will fly as low as 1,500 feet near NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field and unspecified landmarks in multiple cities, including San Francisco and Sacramento.

WASHINGTON -- The countdown has begun for delivery of the retired space shuttle Endeavour to Los Angeles, the last orbiter that will fly out of Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a jet. L.A.'s welcome of the Endeavour is shaping up as splashier than Kennedy Space Center's farewell. L.A. is promising a marching band, among other fanfare, fitting for the spectacle of a space shuttle traveling through the city streets ; the program at Kennedy Space Center (expect speeches) is still being put together.

WASHINGTON — As air-show flyovers go, this one would be huge: a NASA space shuttle riding piggyback atop a massive 747 airliner. That sight already has wowed crowds this year in New York and Washington, D.C., and promoter Bryan Lilley figured that Florida residents — specifically, those at his air show — should get one last shot at seeing the shuttle before NASA completes its delivery of the retired orbiters to museums nationwide. So Lilley gambled. Rather than schedule the Cocoa Beach Air Show during its usual time slot in late October, he moved the event to mid-September in hopes that the timing would coincide with the transfer of shuttle Endeavour from Kennedy Space Center to a Los Angeles museum.

The Big Apple will have to wait a few more days for its space shuttle to arrive. The retiring space shuttle Enterprise was supposed to arrive Wednesday, but bad weather delayed the plans for a dramatic New York City flyover. (The flyover was originally supposed to happen Monday, but an unfavorable forecast scuttled those plans, too.) NASA said Wednesday that the rendezvous could now take place Friday -- Mother Nature permitting. The highly anticipated flyover comes as the space shuttle heads into retirement at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum this summer in New York City.

A cultural moment is passing. The space shuttle Discovery, strapped to the back of a Boeing 747, was recently ferried with great fanfare to its new home at a branch of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Virginia. The California Science Center is building an aircraft hangar for its sister shuttle, Endeavour, which is expected to arrive in Los Angeles in the fall. The remaining shuttle, Atlantis, is in Florida, where it will be displayed at the Kennedy Space Center. Useful artifacts of daily life, however rarefied, are moving into the look-but-don't-touch precinct of museum galleries, like ancient Greek storage vases or Edwardian pantaloons.

Gearing down for at least a year's delay in the space shuttle program, NASA issued the first of 1,100 layoff notices here Friday but pledged to keep its work force in a "strong posture" to resume space flights. The layoffs, the largest NASA staff cutbacks since the end of the Apollo program more than a decade ago, affect 7% of the 16,000-member team that assembles the space shuttle and launches it into orbit.

First there was a big cloud of white smoke in the sky. Then an ear-splitting boom. Flames shot across the sky. "I see it!" 8-year-old Matt exclaimed, though 6-year-old Reggie had trouble figuring out exactly where to look. We were seven miles away, after all. We cheered wildly, along with thousands of other people who lined the beach on Merritt Island, Fla., just after 8 a.m. on that breezy morning last month.

It was an extraordinary sight, even for Washington -- a space shuttle flying over the nation's capital atop a modified 747 on the way to its permanent new home, the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. Crowds gathered on the National Mall, office workers peered out windows and motorists pulled to the side of the road to catch a glimpse of the retired Discovery orbiter , which made a sweep of the capital region, over the monuments, before landing at Dulles International Airport in northern Virginia.

The California Science Center will soon begin construction of an aircraft hangar for the space shuttle Endeavour, the museum's president said. The hangar will be built northwest of the state-run museum, near downtown Los Angeles, Jeffrey N. Rudolph, president of the science center, said. Construction is scheduled to begin in a couple of weeks. The temporary climate-controlled home will allow the museum to make Endeavour available for public viewing within weeks of its arrival in the fall.