Deb Thompson

It's Louisiana History time! Here's 'Today in Louisiana History' At 9:32 a.m. EDT on July 16, 1969, the most powerful machine human beings had ever built at that time rose off Pad 39A in Florida carrying Apollo 11 toward the Moon. An estimated half a billion people watched. What most of them didn't know: the monster doing all the work in those first two and a half minutes; the towering first stage of the Saturn V, with five F-1 engines pouring out seven and a half million pounds of thrust, was built in New Orleans. The Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans East is one of the largest manufacturing plants in the world, a building so vast it has its own weather quirks, sitting on the Intracoastal Waterway at the edge of the marsh. In the 1960s, NASA and Boeing filled it with thousands of Louisiana workers: welders, machinists, engineers, and inspectors. Boeing’s team at Michoud was tasked with building the S-IC, the 138-foot first stage that had to lift the entire 363-foot, six-million-pound Saturn V off the pad and punch it through the thickest part of the atmosphere. Every Saturn V that ever flew rode a first stage born at Michoud, barged from New Orleans across the Gulf to Florida because no road or railcar could carry it. On July 16, the Louisiana-built stage did its job to perfection: two and a half minutes of controlled chaos, pushing Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins to the edge of space before dropping away into the Atlantic, spent, while the mission it made possible flew on into history. Michoud never stopped. Today that same New Orleans East plant builds the core stage of NASA's SLS rocket, the vehicle of the Artemis program, tasked with carrying astronauts back toward the Moon. The hands are new, the welding is done by some of the most advanced robotic tooling on Earth, but the plant is still fundamental in sending rockets and astronauts into space!