- Manto, Cindy Donze.
Michoud Assembly Facility.
Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2014.
ISBN 978-1-5316-6969-0.
-
In March, 1763, King Louis XV of France made a land grant
of 140 square kilometres to Gilbert Antoine St Maxent,
the richest man in Louisiana Territory and commander of
the militia. The grant required St Maxent to build a road
across the swampy property, develop a plantation, and
reserve all the trees in forested areas for the use of the
French navy. When the Spanish took over the territory
five years later, St Maxent changed his first names
to “Gilberto Antonio” and retained title to
the sprawling estate. In the decades that followed, the
property changed hands and nations several times, eventually,
now part of the United States, being purchased by another
French immigrant, Antoine Michoud, who had left France
after the fall of Napoleon, who his father had served as an
official.
Michoud rapidly established himself as a prosperous businessman
in bustling New Orleans, and after purchasing the large tract
of land set about buying pieces which had been sold off by
previous owners, re-assembling most of the original French
land grant into one of the largest private land holdings in
the United States. The property was mostly used as a sugar
plantation, although territory and rights were ceded over the
years for construction of a lighthouse, railroads, and
telegraph and telephone lines. Much of the land remained
undeveloped, and like other parts of southern Louisiana was
a swamp or, as they now say, “wetlands”.
The land remained in the Michoud family until 1910, when it
was sold in its entirety for US$410,000 in cash
(around US$11 million today)
to a developer who promptly defaulted, leading to another
series of changes of ownership and dodgy plans for the
land, which most people continued to refer to as the
Michoud Tract. At the start of World War II, the U.S.
government bought a large parcel, initially
intended for construction of Liberty ships. Those plans
quickly fell through, but eventually a huge plant was
erected on the site which, starting in 1943, began to
manufacture components for cargo aircraft, lifeboats,
and components which were used in the Manhattan Project's
isotope separation plants in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
At the end of the war, the plant was declared surplus
but, a few years later, with the outbreak of the Korean War,
it was re-purposed to manufacture engines for Army tanks.
It continued in that role until 1954 when it was placed on
standby and, in 1958, once again declared surplus. There
things stood until mid-1961 when NASA, charged by the
new Kennedy administration to “put a man on the
Moon” was faced with the need to build rockets in
sizes and quantities never before imagined, and to do
so on a tight schedule, racing against the Soviet Union.
In June, 1961, Wernher von Braun, director of the NASA
Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama,
responsible for designing and building those giant boosters,
visited the then-idle Michoud Ordnance Plant and declared
it ideal for NASA's requirements. It had 43 acres (17 hectares)
under one roof, the air conditioning required for precision
work in the Louisiana climate, and was ready to occupy. Most
critically, it was located adjacent to navigable waters which
would allow the enormous rocket stages, far too big to be
shipped by road, rail, or air, to be transported on barges to and
from Huntsville for testing and Cape Canaveral in Florida
to be launched.
In September 1961 NASA officially took over the facility,
renaming it “Michoud Operations”, to be managed by
NASA Marshall as the manufacturing site for the rockets they
designed. Work quickly got underway to set up manufacturing of
the first stage of the
Saturn I and
1B rockets and prepare to
build the much larger
first stage
of the Saturn V Moon rocket.
Before long, new buildings dedicated to assembly and test of the
new rockets, occupied both by NASA and its contractors, began to
spring up around the original plant. In 1965, the installation
was renamed the Michoud Assembly Facility, which name it bears
to this day.
With the end of the Apollo program, it looked like Michoud
might once again be headed for white elephant status, but
the design selected for the Space Shuttle included a very
large
External Tank
comparable in size to the first
stage of the Saturn V which would be discarded on every
flight. Michoud's fabrication and assembly facilities, and
its access to shipping by barge were ideal for this
component of the Shuttle, and a total of 135 tanks built
at Michoud were launched on Shuttle missions between 1981
and 2011.
The retirement of the Space Shuttle once again put the future
of Michoud in doubt. It was originally tapped to build
the core stage of the
Constellation
program's
Ares V booster,
which was similar in size and construction to the Shuttle
External Tank. The cancellation of Constellation in 2010
brought that to a halt, but then Congress and NASA rode to the
rescue with the absurd-as-a-rocket but
excellent-as-a-jobs-program
Space
Launch System (SLS), whose centre core stage also resembles
the External Tank and Ares V. SLS first stage fabrication is
presently underway at Michoud. Perhaps when the
schedule-slipping, bugget-busting SLS is retired after a few
flights (if, in fact, it ever flies at all), bringing to a close
the era of giant taxpayer-funded throwaway rockets, the Michoud
facility can be repurposed to more productive endeavours.
This book is largely a history of Michoud in photos and
captions, with text introducing chapters on each phase of the
facility's history. All of the photos are in black and white,
and are well-reproduced. In the Kindle edition many can be
expanded to show more detail. There are a number of
copy-editing and factual errors in the text and captions, but
not too many to distract or mislead the reader. The
unidentified “visitors” shown touring the Michoud
facility in July 1967 (chapter 3, Kindle location 392) are
actually the
Apollo 7 crew,
Walter Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham,
who would fly on a Michoud-built Saturn 1B in October
1968.
For a book of just 130 pages, most of which are black and white
photographs, the hardcover is hideously expensive (US$29 at this
writing). The Kindle edition is still
pricey (US$13 list price), but may be read for free by Kindle
Unlimited subscribers.
June 2019 