The Day the Last Space Shuttle Tank Drove Across Los Angeles

In May 2016 the last space shuttle external tank rolled 16.5 miles through Los Angeles at a walking pace. I chased it down early that Saturday morning with my phone. This week it went on display, standing upright beside Endeavour.

This post is written from memory and from my photographs, nearly ten years after the day. The numbers come from the news coverage at the time.

On November 13, 2026, the California Science Center opened the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center. Inside, Space Shuttle Endeavour stands upright, bolted to two solid rocket boosters and an orange external tank, posed as if it were about to launch. No other museum in the world shows a complete shuttle stack this way.

The biggest piece of that stack is the tank. I watched it come through the city.

It wasn’t the first piece of it I’d seen.

September 2012: Endeavour over the Bay

On Friday, September 21, 2012, Endeavour made its last flight, riding on the back of NASA’s 747 from Edwards Air Force Base on a farewell loop of California: over Sacramento, over San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge, down the Peninsula, and on to Los Angeles, where it landed at LAX.

I was living in San Francisco then and working at Splunk, whose office was right on the Embarcadero by South Beach Harbor. When word went around that it was coming, people streamed out of the buildings along the waterfront, and I went down in front of the office with everyone else. My phone was not up to it: the shuttle is a white speck between the towers of the Bay Bridge. But everyone in this picture is looking at it.

A crowd on the Embarcadero waterfront in San Francisco looks and points phones toward the Bay Bridge as the 747 carrying Space Shuttle Endeavour flies past, September 21, 2012

Three weeks later it crawled through the streets of Los Angeles to the Science Center. Four years after that, its tank followed.

How a 154-foot tank gets to Los Angeles

The tank is called ET-94. It is about 154 feet long and 27 feet across, and it weighs roughly 66,000 pounds empty. It was built at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans for a shuttle flight that never happened, and it is the last flight tank still in existence. Every tank that did fly broke up over the ocean after launch.

In April 2016 it was loaded onto a barge, the Gulfmaster I, and towed across the Gulf of Mexico, through the Panama Canal and up the Pacific coast, more than 4,400 nautical miles. It came ashore at Marina del Rey on May 18.

That was the easy part. Exposition Park is 16.5 miles inland.

The route

The move started just after midnight on Saturday, May 21, from the Fisherman’s Village parking lot. A custom Mack truck towed the tank on a set of wheeled dollies, and the whole convoy moved at about walking pace.

The route, as published by the Science Center:

Fiji Way to Lincoln Boulevard, then Mindanao Way
The Marina Freeway (CA-90) to Culver Boulevard, and back to Lincoln
Loyola Boulevard, Westchester Parkway and Arbor Vitae Street, along the north edge of LAX
La Brea Avenue to Manchester Boulevard through Inglewood
Vermont Avenue to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and into Exposition Park

It arrived at the Science Center around 6:15 that evening, about 19 hours after it started.

Aviation and Arbor Vitae

A tank that size doesn’t fit through a city built for cars. Crews went ahead of it closing streets, trimming trees, swinging traffic signals out of the way and lifting utility wires.

I hadn’t planned to see any of it. I’d been up working late the night before, saw a news story about the tank being on the road, and decided to go. I left the house around five in the morning, since it had been moving all night and I figured it would be somewhere interesting by then.

Finding it was the hard part. Every road near the route was closed, and from a car there was no getting close. I started down by the Marina, where it had already left, and drove around looking at the crowds at a few different spots. Eventually I stopped chasing it and tried to get ahead of it. The route ran along the north side of LAX, not far from where I live, so I worked out roughly when it would reach Aviation Boulevard and Arbor Vitae Street, parked about ten blocks away and walked in. There was already a crowd on the sidewalk when I got there.

At 8:19 in the morning, a crane truck was lifting a traffic signal arm off its pole on the corner by the ARCO. Regular was $3.27 a gallon.

A crane truck lifts a traffic signal arm off its pole at Aviation Boulevard and Arbor Vitae Street while a worker in a bucket lift unhooks it, beside an ARCO sign showing $3.27 a gallon, May 21, 2016

By 8:31 the arm was lying in the street and the crews were regrouping. Far down Aviation, past the trucks, the tank had come into view.

A crane truck sets a signal arm down on Aviation Boulevard as crews in hard hats gather in the intersection, with the orange tank visible far down the street

By 8:40 the intersection was clear: signal arms down, a line of crew in hard hats and safety vests across Aviation, and the tank waiting a few blocks down the street.

Crew in safety vests line up across an empty Aviation Boulevard as the orange tank waits several blocks behind them

It felt like watching a marathon: no stands or stage, just people lined up along both sides of the street for as far as I could see. It was a Saturday, and it looked like half the neighborhood had come out. Nobody quite knew what to expect, and there was some real tension in the crowd while the crews worked. People cheered at the small victories, like a signal arm swinging clear, and again when the tank finally started to move.

Spectators fill the sidewalk and spill into Aviation Boulevard by a Metro bus stop, watching crews in the intersection, with the orange tank just visible beyond the traffic signal

The turn

The straight stretches were slow. The corners were slower. Coming through Aviation and Arbor Vitae, the tank rode on two sets of wheeled dollies, one under each end, with crew walking beside each set and crouching under the frame to watch the wheels.

The domed nose of the orange tank fills the intersection on its red and yellow Emmert transporter, crew crouched under the frame watching the wheels, a worker in an orange vest in front and a crew member in a bucket lift beside a traffic signal

Getting around the corner took a long series of moves, forward a little, back a little, the front and back ends adjusted separately, over and over. On one side it came within what looked like inches of the trees. I didn’t keep count. Every corner on the route was a job, but this one looked like one of the hardest on the stretch I saw. That frame is my favorite from the morning; it’s also on my photo site.

Up close the tank isn’t smooth. The orange is spray-on foam insulation, dimpled like the skin of an orange, with seams where the sections were joined.

A woman checks her phone and a girl in pink stands beside the transporter, under the dimpled orange foam of the tank, with a truckload of traffic cones alongside

Even with the signal arms gone, it cleared the remaining signal heads by what looked like a few feet.

The ribbed middle section of the tank passes just under a traffic signal on its yellow-and-red Emmert transporter

By 8:50 it was through, rolling east on Arbor Vitae behind a Highway Patrol truck, and the crane trucks were already moving on. As it went, people on the curb high-fived the crew and handed out bottles of water, and for a few minutes the corner felt like a block party.

Spectators on the corner of Arbor Vitae Street watch and photograph the orange tank passing on its Emmert transporter, hung with sponsor banners and a California Science Center sign

The orange tank rolls away down Arbor Vitae Street behind a California Highway Patrol truck with its lights flashing, as spectators watch from the corner

Standing it up

The tank waited at the Science Center for years while the new building was planned. In 2024 it was lifted upright with the boosters, and Endeavour was hoisted on and mated to it. The building was then finished around the stack, which is the part I still find hard to picture: a museum built around a spacecraft, not the other way round.

I haven’t been inside the new center yet. It opened on November 13, and I haven’t made it there.

I have visited Endeavour in its earlier home, the Samuel Oschin Pavilion, a hangar-like building next to the Science Center where it sat horizontally on yellow steel supports for about a decade. Even lying down it’s enormous: you walk under the wing and it feels more like a building than an aircraft.

Space Shuttle Endeavour displayed horizontally on yellow supports in the Samuel Oschin Pavilion, with visitors walking beneath it

Up close you can see where it has been. The black heat-shield tiles on its belly and nose are scorched and patched, each tile a slightly different shade, from twenty-five trips through reentry.

The nose of Endeavour up close, its black heat-shield tiles scorched and uneven, with the name Endeavour on the white fuselage

From underneath, looking back at the three main engine bells and the tail, you get a sense of what all that fuel in the tank was for.

Looking up from beneath Endeavour’s wing at its three main engine bells and tail inside the pavilion

Standing upright, the full stack is nearly 20 stories tall. Visitors ride a gantry-style elevator about 140 feet up the stack and come back down a slide.

Visiting

The Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center opened November 13, 2026, at the California Science Center in Exposition Park. General admission to the Science Center, including the new center, is free. Timed reservations are strongly recommended for now because of demand, and cost $4 a person (free for members); walk-ups can get in without the fee when a time slot is open. Check californiasciencecenter.org before you go.

Sources

Space.com, “Space Shuttle External Tank Completes Road Trip to CA Science Center” (May 2016)
Spaceflight Now, “Parade moves last shuttle fuel tank to museum for Endeavour display” (May 21, 2016)
NASA JPL, “Navigating L.A. with 65,000 pounds of NASA space shuttle history” (May 18, 2016)
Culver City News, “ET-94 arrives in Marina; to journey across LA Saturday” (route)
PR Newswire, “Space Shuttle Endeavour Is Now Fully Stacked and Mated”
Associated Press via the Washington Times, “Endeavour flies by Golden Gate Bridge, other sites” (September 21, 2012)
Time Out Los Angeles, “Here’s how you can reserve your time to see Space Shuttle Endeavour in its ready-to-launch position” (admission and reservations)