Sunday Night Highlight – If You Want to go into Orbit, You Have to go through New Orleans

With the pace of news ever increasing, it is easy to miss some of the positive wins and momentum coming from the New Orleans region. To help mitigate this “good news gap,” every Sunday we will send out a brief “Sunday Night Highlight,” profiling a win, partner, or stat of which we are proud. Please feel free to send us suggestions!

For more than 60 years, NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) in New Orleans East has been “America’s rocket factory,” the nation’s premiere site for manufacturing and assembly of large-scale space systems. The facility is one of the largest in the world, with 43 acres of manufacturing space under one roof, about 31 football fields. Every single manned space flight in American history – including the Apollo mission to the moon in the 1960s, and the Space Shuttle after that – was partially built in New Orleans at Michoud.

Today, Michoud is manufacturing and assembling the largest rocket stage in human history: the Space Launch System (SLS) core stage—the world’s most powerful rocket, which will send the Orion spacecraft, astronauts and supplies on exploration missions to the Moon and then Mars.  Significantly, NASA’s Artemis III mission, currently planned for 2025, will mark the first time a woman and a person of color land on the moon. The mission will also mark the first time humans return to the moon in more than 50 years, and the first time humans explore the region near the lunar South Pole.

You can learn more how to get into orbit via New Orleans here.