Tanks for the Memories

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Almost the end of an era: the last external tank scheduled to fly on a shuttle mission was rolled out of the Michoud Assembly Facility on Thursday. The tank, ET-138, traveled on a wheeled transporter one mile to the Michoud barge dock, accompanied by a brass band and hundreds of the workers who built tanks over the past 37 years. One additional tank will come from Michoud; ET-122, which was at damaged Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, and is being restored to flight configuration and is scheduled for delivery to Kennedy in late September to serve as the “Launch on Need” tank, for the STS-335 rescue ship, if needed. Or, it might get to fly in space – no decision yet if NASA will get one additional mission.

You can see a gallery of images from Thursday’s New Orleans’ style celebration at this NASA Flickr page.

The tank will make a 900-mile sea journey to Kennedy Space Center, (around the oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico) and then processing will begin to mate it with shuttle Endeavour and solid rocket boosters for the STS-134 mission, scheduled to launch no earlier than mid-November February 2011. The mission will deliver the Express Logistics Carrier 3 and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the International Space Station. It will be the 36th shuttle mission to the space station and the 134th and final scheduled shuttle flight.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/

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