California Science Center bringing massive space shuttle fuel tank to pair with Endeavour

Three-and-a-half years after millions watched the arduous jouey of space shuttle Endeavour along the streets of Los Angeles to the Califoia Science Center, officials revealed Thursday that another memento from the space program will make a similar trek.

Science center officials aounced that they are just two months away from securing the only remaining flight-ready exteal fuel tank from NASA’s space shuttle program. The Exteal Tank 94, or ET-94, eventually will be paired on display with the Endeavour, which arrived at the science center in September 2012.

The orbiter was delivered in a spectacular cross-country migration that included a heavily engineered, lumbering jouey through the streets of South Los Angeles closely watched by millions of space enthusiasts. The Endeavour already has boosted the museum’s aual visits by 1 million, to about 2.5 million admissions.

ET-94 will make a similar jouey. The 15-story-tall tank is scheduled to arrive by barge at Fisherman’s Village in Marina del Rey on May 19. It then will crawl through the streets of Los Angeles, Inglewood and unincorporated county areas on a truck bed to the science center with a team of spotters that will guide the orange foam-covered tank on its final, 12-mile terrestrial jouey.

Unlike the move of the Endeavour, trees will not have to be uprooted along the route to allow ET-94 to pass. However, traffic signals, street lights and utility lines will have to be removed as the tank makes its way along the route. They then will be reinstalled immediately afterward, officials said.

Califoia Science Center officials have been dreaming for years of exhibiting the NASA space shuttle, which is now parked horizontally, vertically on a launch-pad-like display flanked by its massive fuel tank and two rocket boosters. Construction on the new Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center will begin about the time the fuel tank arrives. It should open to the public in 2019, but there will be opportunities to view the shuttle and tank during construction.

“It’s going to be very, very cool,” said science center President Jeffrey N. Rudolph, who initially thought the museum would have to build a model fuel tank for the exhibit because tanks from the shuttle program are so hard to come by. “This was the only flight-ready exteal tank left in the world. We assumed we’d have to build a replica, which is why we were so excited last year that NASA agreed to transfer it to us.”

The 66,000-pound fuel tanks are so rare because, once they provided the energy to lift an orbiter into space with 1.6 million pounds of propellant, they bued on their retu to Earth and were discarded. Two earlier test models of exteal tanks are on display at museums in Florida and Alabama.

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The ET-94 was intended for flight but ultimately only used for tests to help engineers understand why its predecessor, ET-93, led to the breakup of space shuttle Columbia in 2003. A piece of the foam insulation covering the tank ripped off and damaged the orbiter’s left wing on lift-off, leading to a series of malfunctions that caused it to break apart as it retued to Earth.

“This tank has some interesting history because, in the review of the Columbia investigation, they cut out chunks of this tank to study what happened (and) lea from those mistakes,” Rudolph said. “This was used to improve the whole system.”

The fuel tank’s trip from NASA’s New Orleans manufacturing plant, the Michoud Assembly Facility, will begin when it is loaded onto a barge on April 12 for a jouey that, in total, will cost about $3 million.

It will be wrapped to avoid any ocean water damage and loaded onto a towed flat-deck commercial barge that will cross the Gulf of Mexico and hug the coast of Central America to the Panama Canal. There, it will head northward up the weste coast of Mexico to Marina del Rey. The ocean jouey will take more than a month.

“We’re trying to inspire the next generation,” Rudolph said. “What has really touched me is the tremendous complexity of the space shuttle. It’s an amazing machine and its scale is enormous.”

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