A second line of shuttle employees this morning will join the Storyville Stompers brass band leading the "last" external tank out of its Michoud Assembly Facility hangar east of New Orleans.
The 15-story, 27-foot diameter tank built by Lockheed Martin Corp. will help launch what is now the last of two remaining scheduled shuttle missions, an Endeavour flight targeted for the end of February.
To watch live coverage of the event starting at 9:45 a.m. EDT, click on the NASA TV box at right to launch a viewer. You can also follow live tweets
here.
Guest speakers during a roughly 40-minute ceremony will include U.S. Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana; Robert Lightfoot, director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., which manages the Michoud facility; Bill Hill, assistant associate administrator for the shuttle program; and Joanne Maguire, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company.
Numerous other shuttle program and community leaders are on hand, including two astronauts assigned to the flight labeled
STS-134: commander Mark Kelly and mission specialist Roberto Vittori.
The tank, known as ET-138, will be loaded on the Pegasus barge and towed 900 miles across the Gulf of Mexico to Kennedy Space Center, likely arriving by next Wednesday.
Michoud will deliver another tank to KSC that will serve a shuttle on standby in case anything goes wrong with that last scheduled mission.
However, NASA, the White House and Congress are considering whether to fly that "launch on need" shuttle -- assuming it is not needed in an emergency -- for a 135th and final mission before the shuttle program is retired.
), here’s a comparison of the cryomagnet & permanent magnet.
