Space shuttle external tank to be displayed in Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES (AP) — NASA has shipped its last space shuttle external propellant tank to California to join the retired orbiter Endeavour on display in Los Angeles.

The plan is to mount the winged spaceship vertically on the massive tank as if ready for launch, complete with a real pair of solid rocket boosters.

The huge orange tank arrived aboard a barge early Wednesday at Marina del Rey on the Los Angeles County coast after a trip that took it from a space agency facility in Louisiana, through the Gulf of Mexico and the Panama Canal, and up the Pacific Coast of Mexico.

Inside the tank are two internal tanks — one for liquid oxygen and a much larger one for liquid hydrogen (held at minus-423 degrees) — the propellants that fed a space shuttle's three main engines.

The tank's surface is covered with a layer of sprayed-on foam designed to keep the propellants at the proper temperature, reduce the formation of ice and to provide protection from heat as it sped through the atmosphere.