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NASA and Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company have paid tribute to the workforce who built the external tanks for the space shuttle fleet. The last external tank scheduled to fly on a shuttle mission was completed on June 25 by Lockheed Martin workers at Michoud. "ET-138 is the last in a series of tanks that has provided increasingly safer launches of space shuttles," said John Honeycutt, manager of the External Tank project. The tank was scheduled to depart after the ceremony Thursday aboard the Pegasus barge on a six-day, 900-mile sea journey to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida where...

The Space Shuttle Program’s final flight tank, designated External Tank-138, has completed a critical production milestone at the NASA Michoud Assembly Facility. Lockheed Martin builds the External Tanks in New Orleans where its engineers and technicians mechanically spliced ET-138’s liquid oxygen (LO2)/intertank to the liquid hydrogen (LH2) tank, thus producing “a whole tank” for the first time in the production process. The work is performed in Cell A in the 20-story-tall Vertical Assembly Building, and is the only time during production that the tank is standing upright. Workers also completed foam closeouts on the LH2 to intertank flange. An External...

A series of documents acquired by NASASpaceflight explain the split of opinion that Shuttle manager Wayne Hale referred to during Friday's Shuttle update press conference. That split came during the PRCB (Program Requirements Control Board) meeting just a day previous, with the rationale to hold Discovery's STS-121 mission until further modifications are made on the ice/frost ramps, outlined in a series of presentations. The following information was collated from several documents, dated the 26th and 27th of April. Selected scans are available (click images below - full documents available on L2) At the conclusion of last week's PRCB it was...

NASA memo warns impact of Katrina, tank problems could be long lasting As NASA continues to assess the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the future of the shuttle program, at least one official is warning it could take up to a year before the next flight takes off.

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