Tanks for the Memories

By Nancy Atkinson - July 9, 2010 at 7:58 AM UTC | Space Exploration
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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 Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com