I know I’m getting a bit monomaniacal on the subject of space shuttles, but I can’t help it… there’s so much cool stuff floating around the web right now that I want to share. I hope it’s not getting too tiresome.

Here’s a photo that caught my eye earlier today of Atlantis being lowered into position alongside the “stack,” i.e., the combined external tank and solid-rocket boosters. As I said last night, the sight of a 150,000-pound spaceplane dangling 500 or so feet up in the air, inside a building no less, amazes me:

See that little red dot down there on the platform with the smaller white dot on top? That’s a person wearing (presumably) a red jacket and a hardhat. Just to give you some sense of the scale we’re dealing with here.

Meanwhile, up there in the sky, Endeavour astronauts have successfully installed the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment on the side of the ISS using the shuttle’s robot arm, and I understand it’s already sending back usable data. The orbital work day is winding down with astronauts Drew Feustel and Greg Chamitoff “camping out” in the station’s airlock in preparation for their spacewalk tomorrow. Because the air pressure in their spacesuits will be lower than what they’ve been breathing inside the station and shuttle, they could suffer from the bends if they have nitrogen bubbles in their blood, just like deep-sea divers who ascend too quickly. So during the night, the pressure in the airlock will be gradually lowered to help them acclimate. It’s not like the movies where people just throw on their suits and walk outside as casually as you’d put on a coat!

Credit where it’s due: the image of Atlantis came from NASA’s own TwitPic feed.