Michoud Assembly Facility

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The Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) is an 832-acre (337-hectare) industrial complex for the manufacture and structural assembly of aerospace vehicles and components. It is owned by NASA and located in New Orleans East, a section of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the United States. Organizationally it is part of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, and is currently a multi-tenant complex to allow commercial and government contractors, as well as government agencies, to use the site. MAF is one of the largest manufacturing plants in the world with 43 environmentally controlled acres—174,000 m2 (1,870,000 sq ft)—under one roof, and it employs more than 4,200 people. From September 1961 to the end of the Apollo program in December 1972 the site was utilized by Chrysler to build the S-I and S-IB first stages of the Saturn I and Saturn IB rockets, later joined by Boeing to build the S-IC first stage of the Saturn V. From September 5, 1973, to September 20, 2010, the factory was used by Martin Marietta for construction of the Space Shuttle's external fuel tanks. Today, MAF is used by Boeing to fabricate and assemble the core stage of the Space Launch System rocket and by Lockheed Martin to build the pressure vessel of the Orion spacecraft.