**03-PRA-043**

### Federal and State Governments Partnership

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

As Kennedy Space Center (KSC) searched for a way to replace the Korean
War-era hangar that had for years served as the processing laboratory
for its life science experiments to be flown aboard the Space Shuttle,
it engaged Florida leaders in discussing a bold new partnership to
design, construct, and operate a Space Experiment Research and
Processing Laboratory (SERPL). This facility would serve as the primary
gateway to the International Space Station for its scientific experiment
payloads.

Acting through the Florida Space Agency, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and a
group of legislative leaders offered the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA) a commitment of \$30 million in State funds to
build the lab that the International Space Station needed and to lease
the lab's capacity to NASA's experiment processing contractor to perform
Space Station payload work. In addition, the lab would host Florida's
university researchers and their colleagues. The NASA KSC team
identified and obtained program commitment for annual lease funding
approximating the costs that would have been incurred had operations
continued in the existing, inadequate hangar. This provided a
state-of-the-art replacement facility, fair return on the State's
investment, with neutral impact to the NASA facility budget.

In addition, NASA and Florida leaders saw this laboratory as an
opportunity to expand KSC and the State's resident research and
development capabilities, recruit intellectual capital, and attract
private investment to establish a robust space industry sector willing
to locate here for the long haul.

This 100,000-square-foot facility will host the world's most preeminent
scientists engaged in life science research to be conducted aboard the
orbiting space station. In accredited laboratories and processing areas,
NASA's life sciences support personnel will carefully house and prepare
these experiments for launch aboard the Space Shuttle from KSC to the
Space Station.

SERPL's state-of-the-art laboratories are also available for use by
qualified researchers working in collaboration with KSC or through the
Florida Space Research Institute (FSRI), established by the State of
Florida to promote and coordinate access by public and private
universities and associated institutes.

SERPL will also support NASA research in fundamental biology, such as
investigations into how microbial communities evolve in open and closed
environmental systems and the Center's ongoing research in Conservation
Biology. For over 25 years, KSC's ecological research has been a key
component of NASA's environmental stewardship of the Cape Canaveral
Spaceport.

Experiments prepared at SERPL and then flown aboard the International
Space Station, and other ground-based research performed in SERPL
laboratories, will add immensely to NASA's knowledge of biology and may
lead to breakthrough technologies to enable humanity's future
colonization of space and improve the human condition here on Earth.

For additional information, please contact Mr. Donald Schiller at
321-867-2556 or by email at donald.schiller-1@nasa.gov.