“What we’re bringing for our users is basically an immersive experience of a huge portion of the NASA Kennedy Space Center facility.”

Ryan Falor, project manager of Google’s Street View. In honor of the center’s 50th anniversary, Street View is adding more than 6,000 images of the Space Center, the starting point for Apollo and space shuttle missions. 

“So you can go into the facility, you can go into some of the large areas there, like the Vehicle Assembly Building. You can go down to the launch pad and actually go up several floors of the launch pad and see where the astronauts would walk and where they would go as they were boarding the shuttle.”

The shuttle is now a thing of the past. But someday Kennedy will host a new generation of spacecraft.

“When we were there we actually got to take a snapshot of these structures and these systems in place before all those transitions happened. Many of those facilities are going to be decommissioned or converted to different uses. So the opportunity to kind of capture that moment in Street View and preserve it, and make it accessible to people around the world, is I think really valuable and important.”

You can explore Kennedy for yourself at maps.google.com/nasa

—John Matson

[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]