Congrats Jim Kennedy

Congratulations to Jim Kennedy, head honcho at Kennedy Space Center.

The center director earned this year's Dr. Kurt H. Debus Award from the Florida arm of the National Space Club. Kennedy picked up the award at a space club dinner over the weekend.

The space club first presented the award in 1980, and it was created to honor "significant achievements and contributions made in Florida to the American aerospace effort."

In this case, the club honored Kennedy for his leadership of the launch operations team that got Discovery off the ground on the first space shuttle mission since the 2003 Columbia catastrophe.

Return to flight got all the attention, but it's worth noting some of the other less-visible achievements in the time since Kennedy took over shortly after the accident:

1. Kennedy's straight talk and contagious optimism helped the center's 15,000 or so workers recover from the post-Columbia turmoil.

2. He rode herd over the complete reorganization of the center's safety operation, which had been hammered by accident investigators as ineffectual in part because of years of budget cuts.

3. In tandem with return to flight, he has put together a team that is preparing to transform KSC from the shuttle/station era back into a moonport.

You can read more about the space club here, and more about Jim Kennedy here.