This week, as the nation marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrinโs July 20, 1969 walk on the moon, we remember the role of local workers who helped get those astronauts there.
The booster rockets for Apollo 11 and many other missions were built at the NASA Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans East and test fired at the John C. Stennis Space Center on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Michoud gets its name from Antoine Michoud, a Frenchman who operated a sugar cane plantation and refinery at the site in the 19th century. In the 1940s, the area was used as a military production facility for Higgins Industries. In 1961, as the space race heated up, the 45-acre site was acquired by NASA and assigned to Chrysler and Boeing for the production of the Saturn I and Saturn V booster rockets. A NASA facility also opened in southwest Mississippi in 1961 as a testing facility for the rockets built in New Orleans East.
In 1980, that facility was named for U.S. Sen. John C. Stennis of Mississippi. The Michoud facility, which at one point employed 12,000 people, was chosen in part because of its large available manufacturing space and its proximity to water, which made transporting rockets to other NASA facilities much easier.
Beginning in 1980, workers for Martin Marietta, which later became Lockheed Martin, also built the external tanks for the NASA Space Shuttle program at Michoud. Currently, workers there are involved in construction for the Space Launch System, the NASA program that aims to land the next man and first woman on the moon by 2024 and also explore Mars.
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