KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLA. - The Pegasus barge, towed by the solid rocket booster retrieval ship Freedom Star to Port Canaveral from the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, waits for a tug boat to finish the trip to the turn basin near NASA Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building. The barge carries the redesigned external fuel tank that will launch the Space Shuttle Discovery on the next shuttle mission, STS-121. After off-loading, the tank will be moved into the Vehicle Assembly Building and lifted into a checkout cell for further work. The tank, designated ET-119, will fly with many major safety changes, including the removal of the protuberance air load ramps. A large piece of foam from one of the ramps came off during the July 2005 launch of the last shuttle mission. The ramps were removed to help eliminate a potential source of damaging debris to the space shuttle. Launch of Discovery is scheduled for May 2006. Photo credit: NASA/Cory Huston KSC-06pd0382

The Space Shuttle program was the United States government's manned launch vehicle program from 1981 to 2011, administered by NASA and officially beginning in 1972. The Space Shuttle system—composed of an orbiter launched with two reusable solid rocket boosters and a disposable external fuel tank— carried up to eight astronauts and up to 50,000 lb (23,000 kg) of payload into low Earth orbit (LEO). When its mission was complete, the orbiter would re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and lands as a glider. Although the concept had been explored since the late 1960s, the program formally commenced in 1972 and was the focus of NASA's manned operations after the final Apollo and Skylab flights in the mid-1970s. It started with the launch of the first shuttle Columbia on April 12, 1981, on STS-1. and finished with its last mission, STS-135 flown by Atlantis, in July 2011.

Set of images depicting various harbors, ports, and piers together with ships, fishing and sailing boats, and all types of haven-like places and views. All large image sets on Picryl.com are made in two steps: First, we picked a set to train AI vision to recognize the feature, and after that, we ran all 25M+ images in our database through an image recognition machine. As usual, all media in the collection belong to the public domain. There is no limitation on the dataset usage - educational, scientific, or commercial.