Scott Andrews / for msnbc.com

In one of 120,000 images shot during the time-lapse, NASA's space shuttle Atlantis is hoisted before being mounted with "the stack" before rollout at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

As the sun sets on NASA's spaceflight program, three talented people set out to document the preparations for shuttle Atlantis' final launch.

Armed with 15 cameras, Scott Andrews, his son Philip Andrews and Stan Jirman teamed up to shoot and seamlessly combine a whopping 120,000 still images. The finished product is condensed into a 3-minute time-lapse video that makes the four-day process of preparing the shuttle for its trek to the launch pad look like a cakewalk.

The time-lapse is the culmination of 40 years of collaboration. Photographer Scott Andrews, a technical consultant for Canon, has been photographing launches and landings professionally since Apollo 15 in July 1971.

Scott Andrews / for msnbc.com

The morning after rollout, NASA's space shuttle Atlantis rests on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Throughout the years he has helped hundreds of photographers from around the world and worked closely with the NASA spaceflight program. Scott said his main mission in creating the time-lapse is to pay tribute to all of the shuttle workers.

Referring to the origins of the time-lapse video, Scott said "Anybody could have done this time lapse — but nobody did."

So Scott sat down and drafted a 47-page proposal and made six trips to the Kennedy Space Center to finally get the "yes" he needed. This all hinged on the trust he had built during his tenure, split between Kennedy and Johnson space centers.

In the end, they produced a tribute to not only the shuttle workers, but also NASA and the spaceflight program as a whole.

Veteran NBC space correspondent Jay Barbree summed it up best: "When historians look back, they will write that the shuttle was a reusable ship that carried astronauts into orbit.  It was an essential brick on the road to distant places beyond our planet."

Related content:

• Slideshow: The life of shuttle Atlantis
• Video: Space shuttle crew: 'We want to make sure we go out in style'
• Slideshow: Month in Space Pictures
• More space news from msnbc.com

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

Susan Crippen is to be laid off next month from her job as a shuttle crew trainer at Johnson Space Center.

Thirty years ago, Bob Crippen was on the first space shuttle crew. Twenty-four years ago, his daughter Susan became part of the space effort as well, taking a job as a shuttle crew trainer at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Now the shuttle program is ending, and so is Susan Crippen's job.

I asked her whether her famous father had any advice for her. "No," she replied. "He just worries about me getting laid off."

Crippen, 46, is just one of an estimated 4,500 NASA contract employees due to lose their jobs between now and mid-August, including about 1,000 in the Houston area. She works for United Space Alliance, the shuttle program's prime contractor, as a training instructor for simulated shuttle launches and landings.

NASA file

NASA astronaut Bob Crippen floats in weightlessness during the first shuttle mission, STS-1, in 1981.

The shuttle Atlantis' astronauts went through their final simulations last Friday. After the sim, the crew of four gave Crippen and her colleagues a round of goodbye hugs. Now the shuttle crew is in Florida, getting ready for this Friday's scheduled launch. The motion-base simulator on which they trained will go to Texas A&M's aerospace engineering department.  Other training equipment will be divvied up among museums across the country. And in just a few weeks, the shuttle training team will be disbanded.

For the next few years at least, NASA's astronauts will be trained in Russia to ride in Soyuz spacecraft to and from the International Space Station, under the command of Russian cosmonauts. They'll still get training in Houston for operations aboard the space station, and for the spacewalks that will need to be conducted from the station. Eventually, the astronauts might have to learn their way around the commercial space taxis that are just now in the design and development phase. But from now on, no one will ever need to be trained to fly the space shuttle. 

When I visited the team's control room on Friday, just hours after the final sim, a half-dozen trainers were reflecting on their storied past and their uncertain future. Susan Crippen studied physics at the Unversity of Texas at Austin, and went to work at Johnson Space Center right after graduation. She's not yet sure what she's going to do after she's laid off, but it sounds as if aerospace is in her blood — in part because of the family connection.

Bob Crippen was a naval aviator who was assigned to the Air Force's military astronaut program in 1966. He became a NASA astronaut in 1969, just after the Apollo 11 moon landing. In 1981, Crippen and Apollo 16 commander John Young flew Columbia on the shuttle program's first space mission — a mission that historians now say was riskier than NASA thought at the time. After STS-1, Bob Crippen flew on the shuttle three more times. He took on a variety of management posts at NASA, left the space agency in 1995, then worked as an aerospace executive until his retirement in 2001.

Susan Crippen, the second of three daughters, still remembers that first shuttle flight.

"I did go to the first launch, but I'm not going to the last launch," she told me.

Instead, she'll be standing by at Mission Control, along with other trainers from the team.

"If anything occurs that's unexpected, our teams will get called for real-time support, and we'll go over here to the simulators, and we'll run through those procedures, kind of like in Apollo 13," shuttle training team lead Juan Garriga told the Houston Chronicle.

During Friday's final simulation run, the trainers were wearing matching green polo shirts, emblazoned with the logo for Atlantis' final mission, which is known as STS-135. Garriga made it sound as if there was a little magic in the number: He told me that when he tallied up his team's requests for the STS-135 shirts, the number of entries came to ... 135.

Maybe it's a good omen for the future. The shuttle team could sure use one.

More from Johnson Space Center:

• Inside NASA's 'Skunk Works' lab
• Last shuttle crew faces a heavy load
• After shuttle lands, layoffs loom
• How Atlantis' top tweeter got that way

The shuttle story in depth:

• Interactive: Final shuttle mission in focus
• Cast of characters: Space crews in the spotlight
• Interactive: Space shuttle timeline
• Slideshow: Atlantis, this is your life

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

Roberto Beltramini / Space 3D

A 3-D view created from NASA imagery shows the space shuttle Endeavour docked to the International Space Station during that shuttle's last mission in May.

How can you possibly improve upon the ultimate pictures of the space shuttle and the International Space Station together in orbit? By turning them into 3-D photos, of course.

That's what Italian amateur astronomer Roberto Beltramini did with the imagery captured in May by his countryman, astronaut Paolo Nespoli. The "ultimate" opportunity presented itself when Nespoli and two other spacefliers were leaving the space station to come back home during the shuttle Endeavour's final orbital tour. Nespoli shot high-definition stills and video from the departing Soyuz spacecraft, and the fruits of his labors were made public last month.

Beltramini took pairs of slightly offset images and tweaked them to produce these stereo views, displayed on his Space 3D gallery and republished with permission.

Roberto Beltramini / Space 3D

In this view, you can make out Endeavour's robotic arm curling around the shuttle. Red-blue glasses are required for the 3-D effect.

Roberto Beltramini / Space 3D

A different perspective shows Endeavour's rear end, head-on.

These are perspectives we'll never see again — not even during Atlantis' program-ending visit to the space station this month. It was a scheduling fluke that a Soyuz craft happened to be leaving the station while Endeavour was docked, and the circumstance is virtually certain not to be repeated.

We just might see Atlantis and the station linked together from a different perspective, however. Photographers such as France's Thierry Legault are getting better and better at snapping amazing pictures of the station-shuttle complex from Earth, and during Atlantis' mission, you'll want to check Legault's website as well as Patrick Vantuyne's 3-D photo gallery.

Update for 9:40 p.m. ET: You'll need red-blue glasses to get the full 3-D effect from the pictures offered by Beltramini and Vantuyne. I'm in the process of sending out 3-D specs to at least a dozen (and probably more) members of the Cosmic Log Facebook community as part of our occasional "3-D Giveaway" program. To join the community, all you have to do is click the "Like" button on the Facebook page. The glasses are being provided courtesy of Microsoft Research. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.) If you're one of today's winners, congrats: I'll start sending out the glasses after Atlantis lifts off.

More 3-D views from space:

• Explore the 3-D depths of Mars
• Get a fresh 3-D look at Phobos
• See a Martian crater in 3-D
• See a Martian milestone in 3-D
• See the Martian arctic in 3-D
• See more depths of Mars in 3-D
• 3-D delights from Mars
• Still more from Mars in 3-D
• Go on a space mission in 3-D
• See the moon's marvels in 3-D
• Saturn's moons in 3-D
• More from outer space in 3-D
• Fly through a nebula in 3-D
• Cosmic Log's 3-D-O-Rama

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

Richard Carson / Reuters

Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson takes a video of the media gathered before the beginning of today's news conference with fellow astronauts Doug Hurley, Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The four astronauts assigned to the last mission of NASA's 30-year-long space shuttle program aren't just burdened with the weight of history: They're expected to transfer four tons of supplies from the shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station in just a few days' time, the kind of job that's usually done with a six- or seven-person crew. They have to be ready to take shelter on the station for months, in the event that something goes wrong with their ride. And as if that weren't enough, they're being inundated with requests for tickets to watch the last-ever liftoff of America's winged spaceship.

If I were a member of Atlantis' foursome, I'd be feeling totally overwhelmed right now. But Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson sounds as if he's totally cool with a mission even he admits will be "very busy, very event-filled."

"This is the right crew for the right time," Ferguson told reporters today during the last-ever shuttle crew news conference at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Atlantis is scheduled to begin its 12-day flight with a July 8 launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle's crew of veteran NASA astronauts, including Ferguson as well as pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim, will be leaving Houston on the Fourth of July to make final preparations for liftoff.

The main objective of the shuttle program's 135th and final mission, known as STS-135, is the transfer of supplies, spare parts and science experiments from the Italian-made Raffaello cargo carrier that's sitting in Atlantis' hold. Items have been color-coded to facilitate the moving job: Everything on the shuttle that has a yellow tag goes into the space station. Everything on the station that has a green tag goes onto the shuttle for return to Earth.

The moving operation will proceed so quickly that "if you stand still and hold a yellow label in your hand," you could find yourself swept up in it, Ferguson joked.

Magnus said she visualizes forming a bucket brigade to facilitate the move. "It's fun to fly around with these bags, back and forth," she said. But even in zero-G, all these objects have inertial mass, so the astronauts have to be careful not to get thrown into a spin during the transfer operations. "You get a little lesson in Newton's laws," Magnus said.

Skeleton crew
The big move is the top priority, but the to-do list doesn't stop there. Two spacewalkers from the space station's crew, Ron Garan and Mike Fossum, will help transfer a broken coolant pump module to Atlantis' cargo bay, and bring out a robotic refueling experiment for installation on the space station. While Garan and Fossum take on maintenance tasks on the station's exterior, Atlantis' skeleton crew will play supporting roles inside the station.

The reason why there are only four astronauts on this last mission is because NASA has to have a contingency plan to keep them on the space station, in the event that serious damage is done to Atlantis during its ascent. The plan calls for the crew members to be rescued, one by one, by taking seats on Russian Soyuz craft over the course of several months. Mission planners decided that a four-person crew was the right number: small enough to make for a realistic rescue plan, while big enough to execute Atlantis' final mission.

It doesn't make the job easy for the astronauts, though. When Ferguson was asked whether there were any advantages to having a smaller-than-usual crew, he could come up with only one: "There are less opinions to contend with," he joked.

Contending with crowds
Although NASA officials haven't yet said how many people they expect to attend Atlantis' launch, it could be one of the biggest crowds to gather around the Florida launch site. At one point, mission managers thought that up to 700,000 spectators might turn out for last month's final launch of the shuttle Endeavour, and the fact that this is the last-ever chance to see a space shuttle launch could well make for higher interest this time around.

"Anybody who has not seen a shuttle launch in person is really missing out," Hurley said. Even the astronauts are having a hard time deciding who will get precious VIP tickets. (Each crew member has about 300 tickets to distribute.)

"The tickets are starting to get more valuable as the launch gets closer," Walheim said.

There's been so much hubbub about the mission that Ferguson said he was actually glad to go into quarantine, the period just before a launch when astronauts are shut off from much of the outside world for medical reasons. "I'm looking forward to a little bit of quiet time," the commander said.

The weight of history
After months of preparations, Atlantis' crew members said it was just now sinking in that they are going to be the last astronauts to ride a space shuttle into orbit — and they had mixed emotions about that. On one hand, Walheim said "we are going to lose a little bit of the beauty of the country when we retire the space shuttle." Ferguson went even further, saying that bidding farewell to the shuttle would be like mourning a friend.

On the other hand, all four astronauts pointed out that Americans would keep on flying into space — initially on Russian transports to the space station, and then on U.S.-made commercial space taxis, and then on a new breed of NASA spaceships designed to go beyond Earth orbit.

Such reflections on the shuttle's past, and on the future of spaceflight, ended up being the weightiest matters considered at today's news briefing. Ferguson predicted that the next person who flies on a U.S. spacecraft into low Earth orbit "probably will not have a NASA badge ... it'll be a badge from Boeing, or SpaceX, or Sierra Nevada." The current scenario calls for those companies' spaceships to be flown initially by private-sector test pilots, and then cleared for the space agency's use. It will take the better part of a decade before NASA astronauts once again guide the agency's next-generation spaceships to a new frontier. 

The 49-year-old commander of the last space shuttle mission recalled that he was inspired to become an astronaut by watching the launch of the first space shuttle mission 30 years ago. "I hope there will be another space vehicle ... that will inspire children in the same way," Ferguson said.

More about the last shuttle mission:

• After shuttle lands, layoffs loom
• Interactive: Final shuttle mission in focus
• Slideshow: This is your life, Atlantis

Stay tuned for more from Johnson Space Center this week, and much more about the shuttle program's final mission next week.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

AMS-02 Roma Group

An artist's conception shows the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the left, installed on one of the International Space Station's truss sections. The device is to be brought up on the shuttle Endeavour.

Big particle-physics experiments have caused their share of unwarranted nightmares over the past few years, including the worries about globe-gobbling black holes and strangelets that might be created by Europe's Large Hadron Collider. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a $2 billion particle detector due to go into orbit on the shuttle Endeavour, just might actually detect strangelets, or the traces of mysterious dark matter, or bits of antimatter that couldn't possibly be created on Earth.

But Samuel Ting, the Nobel-winning MIT physicist who has guided the spectrometer through a troubled 17-year-long development effort, will actually be sleeping a lot easier once the AMS is launched.

"Our only nightmare for AMS during the 17 years was to be removed from the manifest," Ting, the experiment's principal investigator, told me today.

A few years ago, it looked as if NASA would be leaving the van-sized apparatus on the ground just because it couldn't spare a shuttle mission to fly it up to the International Space Station. Ting said he was surprised by that decision, particularly because scientists from 16 countries had contributed so much to the experiment. "I would say 'surprised' is the most polite word I can think of," he said.

Fortunately, Congress set aside the money for a flight to send up the AMS. And when NASA decided to extend operations on the space station to at least 2020, Ting and his team retrofitted the 7-ton, cryogenically cooled detector to make it last as long as the station, even if it stays in orbit until 2030.

Ting reiterated the main goals of the AMS experiment during a news briefing today:

• Look for heavy antimatter particles, such as the nuclei of antihelium or anticarbon, that would otherwise be annihilated as they passed through Earth's atmosphere. The presence of such cosmic particles could shed light on what happened to all the antimatter that should have been created along with ordinary matter in the big bang. "If you expect 20 antihelium and anticarbon [particles], and you never see one, something's wrong," Ting said.
• Watch for the traces left behind by exotic particles that may theoretically account for dark matter, which is thought to account for 90 percent of the matter in the universe but can only be detected by its gravitational effect.
• Keep an eye out for anomalous combinations of particles, such as strangelets, which incorporate an unusual type of "strange" quark.

To make such detections, the AMS will rely on the most powerful magnet launched into space and a complement of seven particle-detecting instruments. An early version of the device underwent real-world testing aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1998, so Ting is confident that AMS-2 will work like a charm after its installation and a shakedown period of eight hours. Once it's installed, the astronauts on the station don't really need to do anything:The data will be beamed down to Earth for analysis — at first to a control center at NASA's Johnson Space Center, and eventually to CERN, Europe's particle physics research center. That's right, the same center that plays host to the Large Hadron Collider.

I suppose the only nightmare Ting has to worry about now is that, for some reason, the AMS doesn't work as planned. He doesn't sound all that worried ... but other physicists have questioned whether the $2 billion project will end up being worth it. In last week's issue of the journal Science, the University of Chicago's Dietrich Muller was quoted as saying that the scientific questions being addressed by the AMS could have been done much more cheaply using high-altitude balloon experiments. And the University of Michigan's Gregory Tarle contended that nuclei from antimatter galaxies would never make it to our corner of the cosmos anyway.

"The major justification for doing AMS has evaporated," Tarle said.

When a reporter brought up Tarle's criticism at the end of today's briefing, Ting dodged the criticism and instead talked about Tarle's university.

"University of Michigan is where I went to school," he observed. "Used to have a very good football team. In the last few years, the team has gone to pot. Last year, they have changed the coach.

"I have no other answer."

Professor Tarle, I think you just got Tinged.

More about the antimatter quest:

• It's official: Heaviest antimatter found
• Space mission hunts for antimatter galaxies
• Antimatter atoms captured at last
• AMS may lead to space radiation shield

Stay tuned for further updates from Kennedy Space Center, in Cosmic Log as well as in msnbc.com's space news section. You can join the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Roberto Gonzalez / Getty Images

Photographers and observers place their cameras at the base of the space shuttle Endeavour's launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida in preparation for Friday's scheduled liftoff.

The wild weather that is sweeping through America's Southeast has had a mild impact on the outlook for the shuttle Endeavour's final flight, with forecasters raising the chances of a delay in Friday's launch from 20 to 30 percent.

Right now, the weather is the only question mark about a flight that's expected to attract upwards of 700,000 spectators, including notables ranging from President Barack Obama and wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to "Star Trek" actor LeVar Burton and gamer/astronaut Richard Garriott.

The skies over Kennedy Space Center in Florida were mostly sunny this morning, but chief weather officer Kathy Winters said that the tail end of a storm system that left a trail of destruction through Alabama was headed for the Florida coast.

"The weather is expected to get a little bit bad this evening," Winters told reporters.

If low clouds are still hanging around when it's time to launch, at 3:47 p.m. ET Friday, the launch would have to be delayed at least 24 hours. The potential cloud ceiling, added to the chance of unacceptably high crosswinds, led Winters and her fellow forecasters to downgrade the weather outlook from 80 percent positive to 70 percent positive. Which is still pretty positive, as weather forecasts go.

NASA test director Jeff Spaulding said the countdown was proceeding without any technical hitches. But if the launch has to be put on hold on Friday, whether for weather or for other reasons, Spaulding said NASA would still have at least three more opportunities for liftoff over the next week.

Notable launch
This launch is notable for several reasons: It marks Endeavour's final space outing before it heads for retirement at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. It'll be the second-to-last shuttle launch ever, setting the stage for Atlantis to close out the 30-year shuttle program this summer. Endeavour will be bringing up the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, one of the biggest physics experiments ever launched into orbit. And perhaps most poignantly, the launch is the focus of a love story involving Giffords and her husband, Endeavour commander Mark Kelly.

Giffords, an Arizona Democrat who is recovering from a grave head wound sustained in January during a shooting attack in Tucson, was flown to Florida from her rehabilitation center in Houston to see the launch and take part in family festivities.

President Obama, along with his wife and two daughters, are due to witness the launch from the space center as well, in between a visit to storm-stricken Alabama and a commencement address at Miami Dade College. The last sitting president to attend a shuttle launch was Bill Clinton, who came to the Cape to see off senator-astronaut John Glenn in 1998. It's not yet clear whether the Obamas will be with Giffords or at a different secure location for the launch.

"We will be ready to accommodate, wherever that location is," Spaulding said. 

Tweeters in attendance
Other celebrities in attendance this time around include LeVar Burton, who played Geordi LaForge on "Star Trek: Next Generation"; and Seth Green, who has appeared in the "Austin Power" movies and a host of other films and TV shows. The actors are among 150 Twitter users who were invited to the launch to participate in a NASA tweetup, and they traded tweets for their own meetup at the Cape.

"Where are you, man?" Burton tweeted to the red-haired Green. "My Ginger detector is on the fritz?"

"Less than 20 feet away from you!" Green replied. "Why won't you say hi to me?!?"

Richard Garriott, the millionaire video-game developer who became the first son of a NASA astronaut to go into space himself in 2008, also tweeted that he was heading down to Florida to see the launch.

Spaulding told reporters that he and the rest of the launch team weren't changing their routine just because a high-profile audience was hoping to see Endeavour rise on Friday. "We do the exact same level of effort" in advance of every liftoff, he said, and there'd be no pressure to put on a show.

"Our team is really focused in on what we're doing here," he said.

More about the shuttle's final days:

• Video: Watching one of the last launches
• Meet the crew of Endeavour's last flight

Stay tuned for further updates from Kennedy Space Center, in Cosmic Log as well as in msnbc.com's space news section. You can join the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA

Endeavour's crew takes a break during Friday's launch rehearsal at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. From left are commander Mark Kelly, pilot Greg Johnson, Michael Fincke, Andrew Feustel, Roberto Vittori and Greg Chamitoff.

Last updated 10:30 a.m. ET April 4:

NASA says the shuttle Endeavour's last scheduled launch will have to be postponed another 10 days to avoid a traffic jam in orbit.

Endeavour's April 19 liftoff will be put off until April 29 at the earliest because the Russians aren't willing to slow down the voyage of a robotic Progress cargo ship to the International Space Station. If both missions had proceeded as planned, the Progress would have shown up while Endeavour was still attached to the space station, which is an operational no-no.

For what it's worth, the delay means that Endeavour is currently due to blast off on the same day as Prince William's royal wedding to Kate Middleton at London's Westminster Abbey. (Sorry, your highness, I'll be attending the launch instead.)

NASA had hoped to persuade the Russians to put their Progress into a "parking orbit" for a few days after its April 27 launch. That would have given Endeavour time to finish its business and fly away from the space station before the cargo ship's automated docking. But the Russians held firm to their timetable for the Progress' arrival, forcing NASA to postpone Endeavour's launch.

The schedule shift first came to light in a report first published Sunday on The Daily Beast website, and a NASA announcement confirmed the report Monday morning.

Last month, NASASpaceflight.com's Chris Bergin noted that NASA and the Russians were in negotiations over the timing of the two missions. One of the sticking points: The Progress' cargo includes a time-sensitive biological experiment that has to be put in the space station's freezer within days of launch.

At the time, Bergin said it was "unlikely" that NASA would change Endeavour's launch date, but that's precisely what happened. The new launch time is 3:47 p.m. ET on April 29.

Endeavour's STS-134 mission is notable for at least three reasons: First, it would be Endeavour's final flight before it is retired and donated to a museum. Second, the shuttle is due to deliver a $2 billion international physics experiment known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. And third, the mission's commander, Mark Kelly, is the husband of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who suffered a grave head injury in a shooting three months ago but now seems likely to attend the launch, whenever it is.

Endeavour and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer were originally due to go up into orbit last November as the final space shuttle mission, but NASA shuffled the launch schedule to give engineers more time to retrofit the physics experiment for extra years of service. Further slips pushed the STS-134 launch from February to April.

Last week, Kelly and his crewmates visited NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a launch rehearsal, just in time to see their spaceship pummeled by severe weather. NASA said Endeavour's external fuel tank suffered only "minor foam damage," and the shuttle orbiter itself was not affected. So the storm played no part in NASA's decision to delay the launch.

One more shuttle flight is scheduled after Endeavour's outing. Atlantis is due to take on the 30-year-old shuttle program's last mission in late June. NASA managers reportedly would prefer to delay that station resupply flight for a couple of months — but stretching out the shuttle program any further would require extra money, and it's not clear whether that funding could be made available.

Tip o' the Log to NBC News' Jay Barbree and NBC News space analyst James Oberg.

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about my book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

CollectSpace

The shuttle Enterprise, which was an aerodynamic test vehicle that never flew in space, gets a once-over at its display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center, near Dulles International Airport in Virginia. Discovery is expected to take Enterprise's place after the retirement of the space shuttle fleet.

Last updated 12:12 p.m. ET March 9:

So what happens now that the shuttle Discovery has made its last landing? The most-flown spaceship in NASA's fleet will almost certainly end up on display at the Smithsonian — but not before it goes through a months-long round of technological taxidermy.

The first steps toward Discovery's destiny aren't all that unusual: NASA will put the orbiter through its routine post-flight maintenance, as if it were going back into space. But instead of prepping the space plane for its next mission, mechanics will give Discovery a major overhaul, turning the world's most complex flying machine into an unflyable museum artifact.

NASA has already figured out how to pull out all the stuff on Discovery that could pose a health hazard, ranging from fuel tanks and plumbing to thermal blankets that have soaked up toxic fumes for the past 26 years. The shuttle's main engines will be replaced with mockups built out of replicas and spare parts. The crew cabin will be spiffed up to look as if it's ready for flight, but in hidden areas, structural shells and skins will take the place of flight hardware.

When museumgoers get their first up-close peek at Discovery next year, they may have no idea that the space shuttle has been stripped down and rebuilt. "To the viewer, it will look as if the shuttle is intact," Robert Z. Pearlman, editor of CollectSpace website and a walking encyclopedia on the shuttle program, told me. "And for future generations of researchers, the process of removing all these materials has been very well documented."

Discovery's destiny is due to be announced officially on April 12, the 30th anniversary of the shuttle fleet's first spaceflight. Officially, Discovery's fate is a closely held secret. But the widespread assumption is that after putting nearly 150 million miles on its odometer, the senior space shuttle will go to the Udvar-Hazy Center, an annex of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum that's right next to Dulles International Airport in Virginia.

Museum spokesman Brian Mullen insists that the Smithsonian is still "in the dark" about where Discovery will end up. "It's really up to NASA," he told me. For months, officials at the museum have been offering a statement so well-worn that it sounded as if Mullen had it memorized: "The museum is involved in discussions about transfer of the orbiter and other artifacts from the shuttle program. The final disposition of shuttle artifacts will be the decision of NASA."

But if NASA doesn't award Discovery to the Smithsonian on April 12, that would be a real shocker.

Sought-after shuttle
Discovery is the shuttle most sought after because it's the most flown and the oldest of the three orbiters remaining in the fleet (Columbia and Challenger, lost in 2003 and 1986, were older) — and also because it was involved in some of NASA's best-known missions, including the 1990 deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope and both of the "return to flight" missions in 1988 and 2005.

NASA offered it to the Smithsonian two years ago, but for a while it looked as if the Smithsonian would have to pass up the opportunity, due to the costs associated with getting a "free" space shuttle. NASA initially said any museum that was awarded a shuttle would have to come up with $42 million to reimburse the space agency for preparation and transport costs. That price tag was knocked down to $28.8 million, but the Smithsonian still reportedly balked. Congress finally stepped in with a legal provision last December saying that the Smithsonian would get a shuttle "at no or nominal cost" if NASA Administrator Charles Bolden thought it was an appropriate venue for display.

If Bolden gives his go-ahead on April 12 as expected, Discovery would take the place of the shuttle Enterprise, a craft that flew several aerodynamic tests in the '70s but never went into space. The Enterprise has been on display at the Udvar-Hazy Center since 2004. Giving Discovery to the Smithsonian means that Enterprise would be up for grabs, along with Endeavour and Atlantis, two other space shuttles that have yet to take their final turn in outer space.

"The Enterprise is an artifact under the Smithsonian's care," Mullen noted. "If we were lucky enough to get a flown orbiter, I'm sure NASA has a plan."

End of the shuttle scramble?
The disposition of Endeavour, Atlantis and presumably Enterprise is one of the hottest contests in the museum world. In all, 29 would-be exhibitors are vying to acquire a space shuttle, even though they'd have to pay the $28.8 million as well as the expense of providing a suitable exhibit space and getting the decommissioned orbiters spruced up for display. NASA wants to make sure the shuttles are better preserved than some high-profile space artifacts from the Apollo era. The prime example was a Saturn 5 rocket that was slowly rotting away at Johnson Space Center. Fortunately for space history buffs, the rocket was restored several years ago and moved to an enclosed, climate-controlled shelter, at a cost of $5 million.

Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex

An artist's concept shows a space shuttle on display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.

The most mentioned players in the shuttle scramble include:

• Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, which has drawn up plans for a $100 million, 64,000-square-foot exhibit where the shuttle would be displayed as if it were in flight, with its robotic arm extended to support an astronaut.
• Space Center Houston, which has proposed the construction of a 53,000-square-foot hangar at the visitor center for Johnson Space Center in Texas.
• The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, which is planning to add a 200,000-square-foot exhibit hall to its grounds. The Dayton museum is particularly interested in Atlantis because of that shuttle's past role in Air Force space missions.
• Seattle's Museum of Flight, which has started work on a $12 million, 15,500-square-foot "Human Space Flight Gallery" that would be available to showcase a shuttle.
• The Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, a dockside facility in Manhattan that has been built alongside the aircraft carrier Intrepid.

It's not yet exactly clear yet how much time would pass between a shuttle's last flight and its handover to one of the museums, but Pearlman said NASA would like to have the shuttles in a position to go to their future homes as little as six months after their final flights. Realistically, the job may take longer than that. "It looks like it will take at least a year for preparations," Mullen told me.

NASA spokesman Michael Curie recently said in an e-mail that the space agency was looking into scenarios that would require the space agency to hang onto a shuttle for longer than expected after retirement. "As a what-if budget exercise, we are looking at what it would cost if a recipient was not ready to take an orbiter right away, and if we wanted to keep an orbiter in long-term storage for potential engineering analysis," he wrote.

United Space Alliance, the contractor that manages most aspects of the shuttle program on NASA's behalf, has proposed using Endeavour and Atlantis in a commercial operation to resupply the International Space Station. That would short-circuit NASA's plan for sending those two shuttles to the museums anytime soon. However, the USA proposal doesn't seem to have a high chance of gaining NASA's support, particularly in view of the Bolden's plan for an April 12 announcement on the shuttles' fate.

The final, final journey
When NASA has finished decommissioning a shuttle, it would be loaded atop the modified Boeing 747 jet that serves as NASA's carrier airplane and flown to the airport that's nearest to the orbiter's destination, Pearlman said. Cranes would be used to lift the shuttle off the plane, and then the exhibitor would take it from there.

If the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex gets one of the shuttles, the job won't require a plane trip, Pearlman noted. And if the Smithsonian gets Discovery as expected, the shuttle would be hoisted off the carrier plane and rolled along Dulles' runway to the Udvar-Hazy Center. The same plane could conceivably give the Enterprise a piggyback flight from Dulles to its new destination.

"While all the other orbiters are seeing the end of their flight careers, Enterprise is getting a bit of a reprieve. It'll have one last carry on the top of a 747," Pearlman joked.

You might think that Pearlman, an enthusiast for space history and memorabilia, would be over the moon at the prospect of seeing Discovery up close in a museum. But that's not the case.

"I think everyone would love to see the orbiters continue flying," he said. "I'd much rather see Discovery go on and fly another 39 flights. I just don't think that at this point, with our national priorities ... well, I don't see that as a very likely possibility."

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