Michoud Assembly Building, Louisiana

The largest pieces for the Saturn rockets, as well as the external fuel tanks for the Space Shuttle, were made at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Building, east of New Orleans. The building covers 1,870,000 square feet. The site was first developed as an aircraft plant in WWII, then was taken over and expanded by NASA in 1961, as an auxiliary site for the Marshall Space Center in Alabama, to build rockets for the Apollo Program. It is still used to manufacture the stages of large satellite-launching rockets, built by Boeing and others. The pieces of rockets that are too large to fit in a plane, train, or truck, have to be transported by boat. Michoud is on a canal, with access to the ocean, so rocket components can be shipped by barge to final assembly and launch sites at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg.