Roberto Beltramini / Space 3D

A 3-D view created from NASA imagery shows the space shuttle Endeavour docked to the International Space Station during that shuttle's last mission in May.

How can you possibly improve upon the ultimate pictures of the space shuttle and the International Space Station together in orbit? By turning them into 3-D photos, of course.

That's what Italian amateur astronomer Roberto Beltramini did with the imagery captured in May by his countryman, astronaut Paolo Nespoli. The "ultimate" opportunity presented itself when Nespoli and two other spacefliers were leaving the space station to come back home during the shuttle Endeavour's final orbital tour. Nespoli shot high-definition stills and video from the departing Soyuz spacecraft, and the fruits of his labors were made public last month.

Beltramini took pairs of slightly offset images and tweaked them to produce these stereo views, displayed on his Space 3D gallery and republished with permission.

Roberto Beltramini / Space 3D

In this view, you can make out Endeavour's robotic arm curling around the shuttle. Red-blue glasses are required for the 3-D effect.

Roberto Beltramini / Space 3D

A different perspective shows Endeavour's rear end, head-on.

These are perspectives we'll never see again — not even during Atlantis' program-ending visit to the space station this month. It was a scheduling fluke that a Soyuz craft happened to be leaving the station while Endeavour was docked, and the circumstance is virtually certain not to be repeated.

We just might see Atlantis and the station linked together from a different perspective, however. Photographers such as France's Thierry Legault are getting better and better at snapping amazing pictures of the station-shuttle complex from Earth, and during Atlantis' mission, you'll want to check Legault's website as well as Patrick Vantuyne's 3-D photo gallery.

Update for 9:40 p.m. ET: You'll need red-blue glasses to get the full 3-D effect from the pictures offered by Beltramini and Vantuyne. I'm in the process of sending out 3-D specs to at least a dozen (and probably more) members of the Cosmic Log Facebook community as part of our occasional "3-D Giveaway" program. To join the community, all you have to do is click the "Like" button on the Facebook page. The glasses are being provided courtesy of Microsoft Research. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.) If you're one of today's winners, congrats: I'll start sending out the glasses after Atlantis lifts off.

More 3-D views from space:

• Explore the 3-D depths of Mars
• Get a fresh 3-D look at Phobos
• See a Martian crater in 3-D
• See a Martian milestone in 3-D
• See the Martian arctic in 3-D
• See more depths of Mars in 3-D
• 3-D delights from Mars
• Still more from Mars in 3-D
• Go on a space mission in 3-D
• See the moon's marvels in 3-D
• Saturn's moons in 3-D
• More from outer space in 3-D
• Fly through a nebula in 3-D
• Cosmic Log's 3-D-O-Rama

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

Richard Carson / Reuters

Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson takes a video of the media gathered before the beginning of today's news conference with fellow astronauts Doug Hurley, Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The four astronauts assigned to the last mission of NASA's 30-year-long space shuttle program aren't just burdened with the weight of history: They're expected to transfer four tons of supplies from the shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station in just a few days' time, the kind of job that's usually done with a six- or seven-person crew. They have to be ready to take shelter on the station for months, in the event that something goes wrong with their ride. And as if that weren't enough, they're being inundated with requests for tickets to watch the last-ever liftoff of America's winged spaceship.

If I were a member of Atlantis' foursome, I'd be feeling totally overwhelmed right now. But Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson sounds as if he's totally cool with a mission even he admits will be "very busy, very event-filled."

"This is the right crew for the right time," Ferguson told reporters today during the last-ever shuttle crew news conference at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Atlantis is scheduled to begin its 12-day flight with a July 8 launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle's crew of veteran NASA astronauts, including Ferguson as well as pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim, will be leaving Houston on the Fourth of July to make final preparations for liftoff.

The main objective of the shuttle program's 135th and final mission, known as STS-135, is the transfer of supplies, spare parts and science experiments from the Italian-made Raffaello cargo carrier that's sitting in Atlantis' hold. Items have been color-coded to facilitate the moving job: Everything on the shuttle that has a yellow tag goes into the space station. Everything on the station that has a green tag goes onto the shuttle for return to Earth.

The moving operation will proceed so quickly that "if you stand still and hold a yellow label in your hand," you could find yourself swept up in it, Ferguson joked.

Magnus said she visualizes forming a bucket brigade to facilitate the move. "It's fun to fly around with these bags, back and forth," she said. But even in zero-G, all these objects have inertial mass, so the astronauts have to be careful not to get thrown into a spin during the transfer operations. "You get a little lesson in Newton's laws," Magnus said.

Skeleton crew
The big move is the top priority, but the to-do list doesn't stop there. Two spacewalkers from the space station's crew, Ron Garan and Mike Fossum, will help transfer a broken coolant pump module to Atlantis' cargo bay, and bring out a robotic refueling experiment for installation on the space station. While Garan and Fossum take on maintenance tasks on the station's exterior, Atlantis' skeleton crew will play supporting roles inside the station.

The reason why there are only four astronauts on this last mission is because NASA has to have a contingency plan to keep them on the space station, in the event that serious damage is done to Atlantis during its ascent. The plan calls for the crew members to be rescued, one by one, by taking seats on Russian Soyuz craft over the course of several months. Mission planners decided that a four-person crew was the right number: small enough to make for a realistic rescue plan, while big enough to execute Atlantis' final mission.

It doesn't make the job easy for the astronauts, though. When Ferguson was asked whether there were any advantages to having a smaller-than-usual crew, he could come up with only one: "There are less opinions to contend with," he joked.

Contending with crowds
Although NASA officials haven't yet said how many people they expect to attend Atlantis' launch, it could be one of the biggest crowds to gather around the Florida launch site. At one point, mission managers thought that up to 700,000 spectators might turn out for last month's final launch of the shuttle Endeavour, and the fact that this is the last-ever chance to see a space shuttle launch could well make for higher interest this time around.

"Anybody who has not seen a shuttle launch in person is really missing out," Hurley said. Even the astronauts are having a hard time deciding who will get precious VIP tickets. (Each crew member has about 300 tickets to distribute.)

"The tickets are starting to get more valuable as the launch gets closer," Walheim said.

There's been so much hubbub about the mission that Ferguson said he was actually glad to go into quarantine, the period just before a launch when astronauts are shut off from much of the outside world for medical reasons. "I'm looking forward to a little bit of quiet time," the commander said.

The weight of history
After months of preparations, Atlantis' crew members said it was just now sinking in that they are going to be the last astronauts to ride a space shuttle into orbit — and they had mixed emotions about that. On one hand, Walheim said "we are going to lose a little bit of the beauty of the country when we retire the space shuttle." Ferguson went even further, saying that bidding farewell to the shuttle would be like mourning a friend.

On the other hand, all four astronauts pointed out that Americans would keep on flying into space — initially on Russian transports to the space station, and then on U.S.-made commercial space taxis, and then on a new breed of NASA spaceships designed to go beyond Earth orbit.

Such reflections on the shuttle's past, and on the future of spaceflight, ended up being the weightiest matters considered at today's news briefing. Ferguson predicted that the next person who flies on a U.S. spacecraft into low Earth orbit "probably will not have a NASA badge ... it'll be a badge from Boeing, or SpaceX, or Sierra Nevada." The current scenario calls for those companies' spaceships to be flown initially by private-sector test pilots, and then cleared for the space agency's use. It will take the better part of a decade before NASA astronauts once again guide the agency's next-generation spaceships to a new frontier. 

The 49-year-old commander of the last space shuttle mission recalled that he was inspired to become an astronaut by watching the launch of the first space shuttle mission 30 years ago. "I hope there will be another space vehicle ... that will inspire children in the same way," Ferguson said.

More about the last shuttle mission:

• After shuttle lands, layoffs loom
• Interactive: Final shuttle mission in focus
• Slideshow: This is your life, Atlantis

Stay tuned for more from Johnson Space Center this week, and much more about the shuttle program's final mission next week.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

NASA file

Assisted by divers, Atlantis astronaut Rex Walheim practices for a spacewalk underwater at Johnson Space Center's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. The lab's training pool will continue to be used for space station training, even after the shuttle fleet is retired. However, some of the spacewalk trainers will be laid off.

NASA managers are providing a sneak preview of the final space shuttle mission during a series of briefings today at Johnson Space Center in Houston, but they're also previewing how the space agency will change once Atlantis lands. One of the obvious changes will be the rapid reduction of the shuttle program's workforce, from about 6,700 workers today to less than a sixth of that number by the end of August.

Even those numbers pale in comparison with what the workforce was at its peak, shuttle program manager John Shannon told a gaggle of reporters at the space center, including yours truly. He estimated that 30,000 contractors were employed by the program at its height, around the time when Endeavour made its debut in 1992.

But there are a couple of bright spots on the horizon: Commercial companies are ramping up operations to take over the job of resupplying the International Space Station, and many of the shuttle program's workers are in a prime position to join those ventures. Looking further ahead, the space station's program director, Mike Suffredini, noted that the orbital outpost is making the transition from its construction phase to an operational phase that could provide more opportunities for research and development.

Here are a few of the bullet points from this morning's briefing on the shuttle and station programs:

• Shannon said the current shuttle workforce included about 5,500 contractor employees, in Texas, Utah, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida, plus slightly fewer than 1,200 NASA civil servants. A couple of days after the shuttle lands, about 3,200 contractors will be laid off. By around mid-August, less than 1,000 contractors would be left to help with the "transition to retirement" for the space shuttle fleet. NASA civil servants would be gradually reassigned to other tasks, including going over to space station operations, keeping tabs on the commercial spaceships and working on NASA's programs for exploration beyond Earth orbit.

• The shuttle program, as a program, ends "30 days after wheels stop," Shannon said. However, he estimated that the transition to retirement, including the process of getting the space shuttles to museums and documenting all the lessons learned over the past 30 years, would take another two years.

• United Space Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed Martin venture that serves as the shuttle program's prime contractor, has previously floated the idea of operating two of the space shuttles as a commercial means of resupplying the space station. The idea hasn't gotten much traction to date, but Shannon said the engineers who are working on Endeavour after its final flight have been holding off from taking any actions that would make the shuttle "unrecoverable" until NASA Headquarters gives the go-ahead. "We're a little off the plan for Endeavour," Shannon told reporters. Further consideration of the United Space Alliance plan could be one of the motivations for the delay, but another possible reason would be to have a flight-capable shuttle available for engineering analysis.

• Some might ask why the shuttles have to be retired. "The bottom line is there's not enough money," Shannon said. NASA's plan for the past seven years has been to finish space station construction, then retire the fleet in order to make way for the next generation of space vehicles. Those vehicles would include spacecraft capable of going beyond Earth orbit, to a near-Earth asteroid, perhaps to the moon, and eventually to Mars. "What we're doing is we're sacrificing the shuttle to enable us to take that next step, and if we were to retire the shuttles, this is the time to do it," Shannon said.

• Suffredini said that Atlantis' mission to make the shuttle fleet's final resupply run to the space station might not sound sexy, but "it's one of the most important flights we've ever had." More than 8,000 pounds of supplies are going up to the station, including two tons' worth of critical spare parts. Those supplies will provide an additional six-month stockpile for space station operations, meaning that the astronauts will have enough supplies to see them through the end of 2012, Suffredini said. By that time, U.S. commercial transports such as SpaceX's Dragon should be part of the supply chain, along with Russian, Japanese and European supply ships.

• So far, all indications are that SpaceX will launch its next Dragon capsule on a Falcon 9 rocket by the end of this year, and have the capsule go all the way to a linkup with the space station. That demonstration would open the way for the beginning of SpaceX's resupply missions under a multibillion-dollar contract with NASA. However, Suffredini said the final decision on having the Dragon hook up with the station had not yet been made. "It's one thing to be done with hardware, it's another thing to be done with software," Suffredini said. SpaceX's work on the Dragon mission still had to go through NASA verification, and "that's going to take us till really close to the end of the year to get all that done," Suffredini said.

• Suffredini said he thought operating the U.S. segment of the space station as a national laboratory "is going to make a big difference" for commercial applications coming from space science. He mentioned the promise of creating new vaccines for salmonella and other infectious diseases, based on studies done in orbit. And he pointed out that the space station would be a cornerstone for NASA's presence in outer space. "It's not just the cornerstone, but it's the only thing from the standpoint of human spaceflight that NASA is operating," Suffredini said.

• Shannon said he was heartened to see how many veterans of the shuttle program were being taken on by other high-tech companies, in aerospace and in other fields. He said he's seen cases where former shuttle employees have been hired at one company, and then "come back and grab six of their friends."

• When one journalist noted that the parking lots and buildings at Johnson Space Center already seem emptier than they once were, Shannon acknowledged that NASA's facilities were indeed emptying out, with simulators and mockups of space hardware soon to be distributed to museums across the country. That can come as a "little bit of a shock," he admitted. But he said the space center was ready and waiting for the next chapter in NASA's history. "Let's fill it up with something else," he said. "Let's fill it up with what the next program is going to require."

Stay tuned for more from Johnson Space Center this week, and much more about the shuttle program's final mission next week.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

Odyssey Space Research

An artist's conception shows one of Odyssey Space Research's iPhones floating in the International Space Station's Tranquility module, with a view of Earth from the Cupola observation deck.

The last space shuttle mission will be the first mission to send iPhones into orbit — but if this experiment works out the way its developers hope, you could be seeing a lot more such devices on the final frontier in the years to come.

The two Apple iPhone 4's certified for launch to the International Space Station on the shuttle Atlantis next month won't being used for phone calls. Astronauts on the space station already have a pretty reliable Internet phone link for that, so they don't have to worry whether AT&T or Verizon provides better reception from space. In fact, the phone function on these iPhones has been disabled.

"My joke is that the roaming charges would be astronomical," Brian Rishikof, the chief executive officer for Houston-based Odyssey Space Research, told me today.

Odyssey has loaded the phones with an app designed to help spacefliers get oriented in case they ever get lost in space. SpaceLab for iOS will be used for four experiments on the station:

• Limb Tracker lets astronauts snap pictures of Earth's horizon and analyzes the shape of the planet's arc, or limb, to estimate altitude as well as flight angle.
• Sensor Cal uses a series of reference photos to calibrate the phone's gyro and accelerometer for subsequent measurements.
• State Acq enable astronauts to estimate their spacecraft's latitude and longitude by matching up iPhone photos with a wireframe of Earth's coastlines.
• LFI checks the effects of space radiation on the iPhone by monitoring certain areas of the phone's memory for single-bit upsets —flipped bits that can scramble a spacecraft's brains. Bit flips have been blamed for space glitches affecting NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Voyager 2 probe, as well as the Toyota accelerator glitches on Earth.

The $100 billion space station is bristling with communication equipment, so it's unlikely that astronauts would ever lose their bearings there. But in the years ahead, NASA will have to rely on commercial space transports, and it's conceivable that mobile devices could serve as backup systems for spacecraft navigation in the event of a catastrophic computer glitch or communication failure. If you've seen the movie "Apollo 13," you might recall that those astronauts had to eyeball Earth through their window to set a course for their return from the moon.

Beyond the experiments, putting the iPhones on the station will help NASA figure out how best to adapt commercial off-the-shelf devices for use in space, said Jeffrey Manber, managing director of NanoRacks. Manber's company developed the rack-storage system in which the phones and other payloads will be flown.

Manber told me it was "extremely difficult" to get the phones certified for spaceflight.

"It was probably one of the hardest payloads we had," he said. "It's not exactly the same iPhone that you or I would buy."

Rishikof said Odyssey disabled the phone function as well as GPS location capabilities, to streamline the certification process and to avoid running afoul of other space communication channels (including military channels). Even if GPS was enabled, "you're not going to get reception" on the space station, Rishikov said. The iPhones also run off pre-certified external batteries rather than the internal batteries, although that situation may change for future experiments, he said.

Manber estimated that it took four to five months to get the phones certified — which is significantly quicker than NanoRacks' average of nine months. "NASA's not getting enough credit for making the process more commercial-friendly," Manber said.

He also said this was only the beginning of a new age for spaceworthy devices, and for NanoRacks. "We've got 60 payloads in the queue," Manber told me. "We have 15 customers already. We're going gangbusters."

Rishikof, meanwhile, said his company is eyeing potential space applications for other mobile devices. "The iPod and the iPad are natural opportunities, but we haven't done anything explicitly yet," he said.

The space iPhones are due to be returned to Earth this fall aboard a returning Russian Soyuz craft. "Actual flight data from the experiments are expected to be collected, analyzed and shared so that educators, students, scientists and space enthusiasts can re-create the experiments as if onboard the ISS itself," Odyssey said in a news release.

But you don't have to wait until then to give SpaceLab a spin. It's already available at the App Store, and you can play around with simulated data that's adjusted for Earth's gravity. Just two days after its release, the app is already heading toward the top of the charts for iPhone educational software.

Update for 6 p.m. ET: Inquiring minds wanted to know exactly what was done to the phones, and so I followed up with Rishikof on that point. He told me iOS operating system was not modified. "We did not 'jailbreak' the phone," he told me. But it wasn't merely a matter of flipping the phones to "airplane mode," either. Rishikof said minor modifications were made in the interest of getting the phones certified for spaceflight in time for launch — modifications that were analogous to, say, yanking a wire. In the future, Odyssey intends to have the iPhone certified for spaceflight as it is, "out of the box," Rishikof said.

Rishikof said he's gratified by the interest in the project, particularly because it shows how gadgets that are increasingly familiar to folks on Earth can become part of the technological landscape in space as well. "That sense of connection is really important," he said.

Meanwhile, NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries told me that if the iPhones work as hoped, that would be of interest to the space agency. He mentioned the Apollo 13 example that I cited above and said, "NASA is always interested in additional layers of redundancy for spacecraft navigation."

Although several sources have said these are the first iPhones to go into space, Humphries pointed out that the line gets fuzzier when you're talking more broadly about mobile devices. "There are lots of iPods and MP3 players" on the space station, Humphries said. But the astronauts don't use them as navigational aids. They use them pretty much as folks on Earth do: for instance, listening to tunes while they do their workouts.

More about space gadgetry:

• iPhone goes to the edge of space
• Put outer-space imagery on your mobile device
• Real space station done, now on to LEGO version

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

DigitalGlobe

The space shuttle Atlantis is visible near the center of this DigitalGlobe satellite image, focusing on the heart of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The large structure toward the left is the 52-story-tall Vehicle Assembly Building, where the shuttle was being taken in preparation for flight. The building just to the left of the VAB is the Launch Control Center. The buildings at top center are orbiter processing facilities, the "garages" where the space shuttles are kept.

This picture turns the tables on the space shuttle Atlantis: Usually, the orbiter gets great views of Earth from space. Here, a satellite in space gets a great view of the orbiter on Earth. It's even more amazing when you realize that DigitalGlobe's satellte happened to be passing over Kennedy Space Center at midday on Tuesday, at just the time when NASA was moving Atlantis over from its orbiter processing facility to the 52-story-tall Vehicle Assembly Building.

Atlantis is now being mated with its external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters inside the VAB, in preparation for NASA's final space shuttle mission. Right now the launch is scheduled to take place in mid-July. Check out this preview story to learn more about Atlantis' "rollover" and the STS-135 mission ahead. And for a ground-level view of the rollover, check out this picture and the others available from Kennedy Space Center's media archive:

NASA

The shuttle Atlantis is parked in front of the Vehicle Assembly Building on Tuesday before being moved inside.

More about the shuttle fleet's last days:

• Shuttle Endeavour lifts off for the last time
• Video: Watching Atlantis' latest launch
• Awesome photo of Endeavour snapped from airplane
• Up, up and away ... to see the shuttle Endeavour

Tip o' the Log to Ian O'Neill at Discovery News.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.