A massive orange rocket section built at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans rolled out on Monday as crews prepared to load it onto the agency’s Pegasus barge bound for Florida. Workers, contractors and local officials lined up on the Michoud campus to watch the slow, methodical move. The piece, which makes up roughly the top four-fifths of the Space Launch System core stage, is the latest New Orleans made milestone on NASA’s path back to the Moon.
According to NASA, the section contains the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks, the intertank and the forward skirt, and will be loaded on the Pegasus barge for delivery to Kennedy Space Center. The agency said media were invited to capture images and hear remarks from NASA and industry leaders at the rollout. NASA also noted that the stage, once outfitted with its RS-25 engines, will provide more than 2 million pounds of thrust for the Artemis III mission.
How This Move Differs
Boeing said the April 20 transfer is notable because crews moved only the top four-fifths of the core stage, leaving the engine section to be integrated later at Kennedy as part of a new production cadence. According to Boeing, the roughly 1.4 mile transfer across the Michoud campus will take several hours and uses upgraded transporters and custom hardware designed for barge transit.
Scenes At Michoud
A photo gallery captured by nola.com shows the Kinfolk Brass Band playing as a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter performed a flyby and contractors and NASA employees watched the rollout. The gallery captions name people on the floor, including a quality inspector identified as Paula Caudill and attendees such as Whitney Sheppard, and show U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy among those photographed on site.
Why Michoud Matters To New Orleans
Local leaders framed the rollout as both a technical milestone and an economic one. Michoud Deputy Director Keith Savoy told WDSU that the facility provides "outstanding jobs" and that Michoud is building core stages for Artemis III, IV and V, keeping a deep roster of skilled trades and suppliers active in New Orleans East.
Next Steps
Teams will load the stage onto the Pegasus barge for a multi-day transit to Kennedy Space Center, where final outfitting and vertical integration will take place, according to NASA. The agency added that the RS-25 engines are scheduled to ship from Stennis Space Center no later than July 2026, and that Artemis III is currently scheduled for launch in 2027 to test rendezvous and docking capabilities needed for future lunar landings.
For Michoud workers and New Orleans, the rollout was both a technical achievement and a hometown moment, a sign that the production cadence is holding and that months of work now shift to Florida ahead of the mission’s next milestones.
