Look to the sky at about 10:30 a.m. Saturday, June 30, and you may see NASA's bubbleheaded Super Guppy essentially a supersized flying aluminum can.

If weather permits, the cargo plane carrying a piece of a space shuttle mock-up from Houston will signal its arrival in Seattle with two passes around Lake Washington before landing at Boeing Field for an 11 a.m. ceremony.

The turboprop Super Guppy may be old, slow and odd-looking, but it gets the job done, said David Elliott, NASA's Super Guppy project manager.

"It's ideal for this kind of work. With its 25-foot diameter, we can fit just about anything in it."

Besides its swollen shape, the Super Guppy's most distinctive feature is the way it's loaded.

The front ends swings away, allowing unobstructed access to a cargo compartment that can swallow objects 25 feet high, 25 feet wide and 111 feet long.

The plane bound for Seattle is the last flying member of a family of eight Guppy aircraft that dates to the early 1960s.

The aircraft were created to carry outsized cargo by expanding the fuselage of Boeing Stratocruisers or related aircraft planes readily available as airlines switched from propeller-driven planes to jetliners.

When the first such plane was created, one observer said it looked like a Pregnant Guppy, and the name stuck.

Early on, its work included carrying Saturn IV rocket parts to Florida's Cape Canaveral, replacing a two-week barge trip that sometimes damaged the rockets.

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