Nathan Mattise
ET-94 never flew into space and will instead settle at the California Science Center (with Endeavour).
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"When you think about [Michoud's] history and its heritage, we did the external tank here," Bobby Watkins, the current director at the NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility, told Ars in late 2015. "That was really our heritage. We built 135 tanks here at Michoud, and that serviced the shuttle program for years."
Yesterday, NASA ended one of the most notable chapters in its history. External Tank 94 (ET-94) left the Michoud Assembly Facility, meaning the site no longer houses any of the iconic fuel containers that helped shuttles reach space since 1981.
ETs were the orange-ish foam-covered containers attached to the shuttle in order to carry large quantities of fuel and oxidizer. (The first few ETs were painted white—with Michoud employees once even running to a nearby Sears and buying out the store's supply in order to meet a deadline—but NASA eventually learned this did not protect against ultraviolet light and ditched the paint to further reduce weight.) They were massive creations; even lightweight versions like ET-94 came in with jaw-dropping specifications: 65,000 pounds, 154-feet long, and more than 27 feet in diameter. During lift-off, ETs would transfer the fuel and oxidizer to the space shuttle main engines before detaching and falling back to the ocean.
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