Behind the Scenes at Michoud

NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans has played a vital role in space exploration for decades and now supports state-of-the-art technology and hardware that will one day take humans to Mars.
Today, News 25’s Kristen Durand went on a tour of the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, where NASA’s rockets are born and gives us a behind the scenes look.
Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans has built space exploration hardware since the 1960’s, everything from the Saturn I and the Saturn V boosters to external tanks for the shuttle program. Now, they’re building the hardware that will carry humans to deep space. Director of Michoud Assembly Facility Bobby Watkins said, “We produce all of the flight hardware for the SLS, the heavy lift rocket for EM1 which is our early mission one which will fly in a 2018 mission with the Orion Space Capsule.”
At 832 acres, the Michoud Assembly Facility is one of the largest manufacturing facilities in the world. The building is 43 acres, that’s about 31 American football fields, and it houses hardware for the Space Launch System Core Stage and the Orion Capsule, including the world’s largest state-of-the-art welding system being used to build the core stage of the Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever built for deep space missions, opening new frontiers for astronauts travelling aboard NASA’s Orion Space Craft. “It’s not made for low Earth orbit. The huge rocket that we’re building on the NASA side of the house, it’s made for deep space exploration. We want to go take a look at maybe an asteroid, understand the chemical makeup of an asteroid or we really want to try to do a journey to Mars,” said Watkins.
In order to make the journey to Mars possible, it will first have to travel through Bay St. Louis at Stennis Space Center for a test firing. SLS Propulsion Expert Darby Cooper said, “It’ll go back on that barge and it will go to the Kennedy Space Center and we’ll then integrate with the rest of the SLS vehicle in the vertical assembly building, the same one that was used for Saturn V and the space shuttle. We roll out to the launch pad,then of course from there, we fly.”
While they’ve taken the first steps towards a manned journey to Mars, NASA still faces several challenges, but they’re confident that one day we will have all the capabilities necessary to get there, land there and live there and it all started here at Michoud.