NASA finishes fresh face on giant meatball

NASA this week finished repainting the world's largest meatball as storm repairs that stem from three hurricanes back in 2004 continue at the nation's primary spaceport.

The giant American flag on Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building is being repainted, too, and that work is nearing completion.

Working on scaffolding secured high above the ground, painters since early this year have been freshening up the flag and the NASA logo, which are on the south side of the 52-story landmark. The building sustained millions of dollars of damage when hurricanes Charley, Frances and Jeanne swept through central Florida during a nine-week span in August and September 2004.

The flag is 209 feet long and 110 feet wide, or about the size of a 60-plane hangar bay on an aircraft carrier. The blue field on the flag is the size of a regulation basketball court, and its 50 stars each are six feet wide. Each of the 13 stripes are the size of a standard interstate highway lane -- wide enough to accommodate 18-wheelers or the tour buses that haul visitors around the spaceport.

The NASA logo, affectionately known as the "meatball," measures about 132 feet by 110 feet and covers 12,300 square feet.













The flag and a U.S. bicentennial logo were painted on the side of the building in 1976 in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the United States of America. The job required 6,000 gallons of paint. In 1998, NASA repainted the flag and replaced the bicentennial symbol with the NASA logo in celebration of the agency's 40th anniversary.

The Vehicle Assembly Building was erected in the early 1960s for the assembly of the U.S. Saturn 5 rockets that carried American astronauts and their cargoes to the moon. It now serves as the assembly building for U.S. space shuttles and will be used to erect new moon rockets when the U.S. sends astronauts back to the lunar surface around 2018.

IMAGE NOTE: Click to enlarge the NASA photos of the repainting work being done on the side of the 52-story Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center. Photo credits: NASA/Jim Grossman.