Michoud Assembly Facility

• 1. Introduction

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  The Michoud Assembly Facility sits on 832 acres in New Orleans East, and it has spent most of its existence building the largest machines human beings have ever launched into space. At any given moment, more than 4,200 people work inside a single roof that shelters 43 environmentally controlled acres. That roof stretches 512 by 340 meters. Walk its length and you pass through the history of American spaceflight: the Saturn V, the Space Shuttle, and the rocket that carries astronauts toward the Moon today. But this place did not start as a rocket factory. It started as a boat yard. And the journey from wooden landing craft to deep-space launch vehicles is stranger than almost anything the facility has ever built. Who built it first? What crisis forced its reinvention? And how does a building nearly destroy itself saving a commercial airliner with no working engines?

• 2. A Factory Born in War

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  Andrew Jackson Higgins directed construction of the original complex in 1940, at the village of Michoud, Louisiana. The United States government commissioned the Higgins-Tucker division of Higgins Industries for a specific wartime purpose: the manufacture of plywood C-76 cargo planes and the Higgins Boat landing craft. The total project cost was $180 million, equivalent to roughly $2.8 billion in 2018 dollars. The cargo plane program never got off the ground. Only two Curtiss C-46 Commando aircraft came off the line in 1943, and the remaining order was cancelled in 1944. For a few years in the 1940s the site was known as Michoud Airfield; by 1952, it had gone inactive. The Korean War brought it back to life. Chrysler Corporation moved into the unused infrastructure and renamed it the Michoud Ordnance Plant, producing engines for Sherman and Patton tanks. The plant also kept a 5,500-foot paved runway in operation. When Chrysler eventually wound down tank production, the company's remaining physical assets at the site caught the attention of someone looking for a place to build something far larger than a tank.

• 3. Wernher von Braun Picks a Site

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  Wernher von Braun chose Michoud to serve as the primary manufacturing facility for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, and the presence of Chrysler's leftover infrastructure played a direct role in that decision. NASA took management of the site under the name MSFC Michoud Operations in 1961, and renamed it the Michoud Assembly Facility in 1965. Chrysler stayed on, building the S-I and S-IB first stages of the Saturn I and Saturn IB rockets from September 1961 through the end of the Apollo program in December 1972. Boeing joined later to build the S-IC first stage of the Saturn V. The factory's ceiling height imposed a hard limit on what could be built inside: a 12-meter restriction ruled out the Saturn C-8 direct-ascent Moon vehicle, and this became one of the major reasons NASA chose the smaller C-5 configuration instead. That C-5 was later renamed the Saturn V. The first stage of the last-constructed Saturn V, designated SA-515, was built by Boeing and remains at Michoud today. Meanwhile, the old Chrysler runway was slowly converted into Saturn Boulevard through the 1960s, its middle section becoming a heliport before the whole structure was decommissioned by the 1970s.

• 4. The Shuttle Tank Years

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  On the 29th of June 1979, the facility rolled out its first Space Shuttle external tank, designated ET-1, which flew on STS-1. Over the decades that followed, Michoud produced 136 tanks under the management of Martin Marietta, a run that lasted from the 5th of September 1973 to the 20th of September 2010. One tank, ET-94, was never used in spaceflight and stayed at the facility as a test article. Another tank, ET-122, had a more dramatic story. Hurricane Katrina breached the roof of the main manufacturing building in 2005, and falling debris damaged ET-122 in storage. Workers refurbished the tank, and it eventually flew on STS-134, the final flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour. Modular parts for the International Space Station were also fabricated at the facility from the mid-1990s until 2010, adding a second major program to the building's output during the shuttle era.

• 5. Thirty-Eight Who Stayed

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  Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, and the Michoud facility survived largely because of a natural ridge along its northwestern boundary, levees on the south and eastern sides, and thirty-eight NASA and Lockheed Martin employees who refused to leave. Those workers stayed behind to operate the facility's pumping systems throughout the storm. Had the pumps gone unattended, the facility would have been destroyed. The team pumped more than one billion gallons of water out of the complex. NASA recognized their decision with the NASA Exceptional Bravery Medal, the agency's highest bravery award. All work shifts were initially suspended through the 26th of September 2005, potentially affecting future shuttle flights. NASA announced faster-than-anticipated repair progress on the 16th of September 2005. The facility reopened for essential personnel on the 3rd of October 2005, and returned to full staffing on the 31st of October 2005. Years later, on the 7th of February 2017, an EF3 tornado tore through Orleans Parish and damaged two major buildings including the main manufacturing structure, injuring five people and contributing to a delay in the first Space Launch System launch until late 2022.

• 6. TACA Flight 110

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  On the 24th of May 1988, a Boeing 737-300 operating as TACA Flight 110 lost power in both engines during a severe thunderstorm over the New Orleans area. The pilots brought the aircraft down on a grassy levee within the Michoud grounds. The landing was successful with no fatalities. Workers towed the plane inside the facility, where its engines were replaced. On the 6th of June, the aircraft took off again using Saturn Boulevard, the former runway that had been converted into a road, carrying only a crew of two and minimal fuel. It flew the short distance to New Orleans International Airport, where full repairs were completed. The episode is a footnote in the facility's history, but it underlines how the old wartime runway, even repurposed as a boulevard, never entirely stopped being useful.

• 7. Building the Next Rocket

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  NASA's Space Launch System, assembled at Michoud by Boeing, ranks third in the history of spaceflight by power, behind the Soviet N1 and the SpaceX Starship. Its first launch took place on the 16th of November 2022. Lockheed Martin builds the pressure vessel of the Orion spacecraft at the same facility; the crew module has 50% more volume than the Apollo command capsule and is designed to carry four to six astronauts. The main manufacturing building, designated Building 103, stretches 512 by 340 meters and contains more than 40 sub-areas for different fabrication and assembly tasks. Internal roads made from polished concrete run the full length of the building, giving overhead cranes, trams, and factory vehicles access to components at every stage of assembly. A shipping port sits 600 meters southwest of the main building, where the Pegasus Barge docks to carry finished SLS components to Kennedy Space Center, and occasionally to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, or the John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi for testing. The North Vertical Assembly Building, constructed in 2011, added vertical welding capacity that the SLS program required. A National Finance Center building west of the complex was badly damaged by the 2017 tornado, was demolished in 2019, and has not yet been replaced.