"We are very busy in the human spaceflight arena trying to get the station built. It is probably the toughest job NASA has ever taken on. Some people claim it was going to the moon. But I will tell you that building this station with 16 other nations is a darn tough job," he said.

Equally important, though, is assigning NASAs 1,665-person civil service work force in Florida to develop new space transportation and spaceport technologies that will radically cut the cost of launching people and cargo into orbit.

Doing so, Bridges said, will go a long way toward opening up the space arena to private companies and, eventually, you and your next-door neighbor.

"This just sums it up: There is a top-level NASA strategic goal to increase safety and reduce costs several orders of magnitude in order to enable an expansion in the commercial market the so-called space tourism market -- where we have hotels in orbit and we use inexpensive space transportation to get people to and from them," Bridges said.

"And to do that, we have got to play our role better than we have in the past, and thats really what this reorganization is all about."

Perhaps the most comprehensive management reorganization in KSCs 37-year history, the restructuring is being ordered as a result of the changing nature of NASAs role at the agencys Florida spaceport.

For more than three decades, NASA civil servants labored side-by-side with contractor personnel, making certain work on rockets, shuttles, satellites and space experiments was done precisely to rigorous agency specifications.

Since 1996, however, NASA has been gradually moving its troops out of day-to-day spaceflight operations, handing the job instead to United Space Alliance a joint partnership between aerospace giants Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

The idea is to save money by letting the contractor do the job with less extensive government oversight while freeing up NASA civil servants to concentrate on station construction as well as research and development.

The new NASA management structure at KSC consolidates many existing offices in a bid to avoid duplicative efforts, increase flexibility and more clearly delineate roles, responsibilities and accountability among agency staffers.

Some KSC civil servants less than 20 percent of the existing work force are likely to assume new duties, but Bridges said no job cuts are envisioned.

In fact, Bridges said KSC is in the process of hiring an additional 75 quality control inspectors and engineers to fill critical skill gaps created during a lengthy downsizing period that stretched throughout the better part of the 1990s.

The new management structure is to be put in place between now and early April. The hoped-for result: A more efficient federal work force ready to tackle the challenges of the 21st century.

"I think its one of those necessary things that we needed to do to get us ready for 2000 and beyond," Bridges said. "And it opens up a lot of exciting opportunities for our people here."