Apollo Business Services

End of shuttle program slams Space Coast economy

"The shuttle has always been special for me because it was the first thing my husband and I shared together," Brenda Mulberry says.

It is also their livelihood.

Florida's Space Coast , with NASA 's Kennedy Space Center as its anchor and identity, is bracing for an economic meltdown when the shuttle program officially ends later this month.

Mulberry's husband already lost his job as a quality engineer in the April 8 layoffs at the Space Center. Mulberry owns Space Shirts and SpaceShirts.com, a silk-screening business with a retail store full of space shuttle memorabilia that will suffer if interest in space wanes.

"It's bad, because we don't want to leave here," says Mulberry, who has two children in high school. "If we leave here, 13 people lose their jobs. A lot of people lose if we leave."

Space Shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to launch for the last time Friday as the final mission in the 30-year-old program. Once the shuttle program is mothballed, more than 8,000 people will have lost their jobs at the Kennedy Space Center. A final round of layoffs is set for July 22, two days after Atlantis lands. Business officials say the layoffs will ripple through Brevard County , a community already reeling from the sluggish economy and 10.8% unemployment.

"It's a one-two punch," says Marcia Gaedcke, president of the Titusville Area Chamber of Commerce, which covers an area where about 40% of Kennedy Space Center employees live. "Everyone's going to feel it. You could really drill down to any business."

Many of the county's businesses — large and small — have ties to the space program. Melissa Stains, president and CEO of the Cocoa Beach Regional Chamber of Commerce, says 25,000 people will take a direct hit when the shuttle program ends.

"Space shuttle is about 9,000 jobs inside the gate," of the Kennedy Space Center, Stains says. For every one person directly employed at Kennedy Space Center, 2.8 people "outside the gate" depend on business from space shuttle operations, she says.

In May, the Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville metro area, which encompasses the Space Coast, had the steepest employment decline in the state, losing 6,800 jobs, the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation reported.

Melbourne Improves Community Services with ERDAS APOLLO : Earth ...

Norcross, Ga., June 21, 2011 — ERDAS announces that the City of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia is using ERDAS APOLLO Essentials – Image Web Server as a foundation for CoMPASS, an intranet mapping application designed to improve city services for citizens.

The City of Melbourne , as a council, oversees Melbourne’s city centre and several inner suburbs. As a capital-city council, it also speaks on behalf of Melbourne in local, national and international forums. Using GIS technologies for over 15 years, the City of Melbourne is seen as a leader in geospatial solutions within the Victorian local government industry.

ERDAS APOLLO Essentials – Image Web Server is a high-speed, specialized application that efficiently distributes massive amounts of geospatial imagery and vectors to thousands of users from a single server with standard hardware, effectively solving the infrastructure congestion problems traditionally associated with deploying large volumes of image data.  An interoperable solution based on OGC standards, ERDAS APOLLO Essentials – Image Web Server rapidly delivers imagery to a variety of CAD, GIS, mobile, web and desktop applications.

Using ERDAS APOLLO Essentials – Image Web Server, CoMPASS unites disparate geospatial datasets and rapidly serves them to city employees and contractors within a comprehensive, easy-to-use interface that enables them to improve community services while minimizing labor, time and costs for the City.  CoMPASS is currently being used extensively by the City‘s contact center and the offices responsible for planning and development, permitting and reviews, health inspection services, and parks and recreation.

With CoMPASS, personnel can gather owner and occupant information about relevant properties and survey the site and its conditions using aerial and ground-level imagery before leaving the office, often eliminating the need for on-site visits and inspections. In cases where on-site visits are still required, office staff can generate a map of the location, easily determine the authority or contractor responsible for the request, and pass along relevant background information, making visits more productive and efficient.

The City of Melbourne is a long-time user of ERDAS IMAGINE and ERDAS ER Mapper and chose ERDAS APOLLO Essentials – Image Web Server as the foundation for CoMPASS due to its extremely rapid delivery and its ability to serve both rasters and vectors equally fast.  Robust architecture ensures maximum availability and complete scalability as the City’s image library grows.

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