NASA Michoud Assembly Facility

Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans is a world-class manufacturing facility providing vital support to NASA exploration and discovery missions. Michoud is NASA-owned and managed for the agency by the Marshall Space Flight Center.

Michoud is unique in that it contains one of the largest production buildings in the nation. Its vertical assembly building proved a critical resource for stacking components of the space shuttle external tank, which was constructed, tested and delivered to NASA's Kennedy Space Center by Michoud throughout the Space Shuttle Program. Between 1979 and 2010, the facility produced 136 tanks; only one of these was never used for spaceflight.

Today, Michoud supports several major projects for America's next generation of space transportation vehicles, including NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket, managed by Marshall, and the Orion spacecraft, managed by Johnson Space Center. Michoud's highly skilled work force is manufacturing and assembling Orion and also will build the critical core stage of the SLS, which is intended to take human explorers farther into our solar system than ever before.