The four astronauts who flew around the Moon and back this year returned to New Orleans this week, touring NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility to meet the employees who built the hardware that carried them into deep space. Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Jeremy Hansen hosted an employee town hall at the facility, fielding questions about their time in space from the workers whose hands shaped the rocket components that made the mission possible.
The visit came just days after the crew received the nation's highest spaceflight honor, and only months removed from a flight that rewrote the record books for how far humans have traveled from Earth. As reported by WDSU, the astronauts completed their flight around the Moon in April 2026 before splashing down safely in the Pacific Ocean. During that 10-day test flight, the crew traveled 695,081 total miles and reached a peak distance of 252,756 miles from Earth, breaking the human deep-space distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970, according to NASA.
Michoud employees helped build critical components used in the Artemis mission, and the town hall gave the astronauts a chance to thank that workforce in person, in the same buildings where the hardware took shape. The visit functioned as something of a homecoming victory lap, following the crew's record-breaking flyby and their recognition just days earlier with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
A Presidential Honor Six Days Earlier
On August 28, President Donald Trump presented all four Artemis II crew members with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor during a ceremony at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, marking the highest spaceflight award bestowed by the United States, as reported by USA Today. That recognition, detailed in Hoodline's earlier coverage of the Houston medal ceremony, set the stage for the crew's arrival in New Orleans less than a week later to meet the people who built their spacecraft.
At Michoud, the astronauts answered employees' questions about their time in space, giving the local workforce direct insight into a mission many of them had a hand in constructing. Michoud's role as the manufacturing hub behind that hardware is not new — the facility was formed on September 7, 1961.
The Factory Behind the Flight
NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans East spans roughly 829 total acres and includes 43 acres of climate-controlled manufacturing floor, according to NASA. The facility supports roughly 3,500 jobs in the New Orleans area through a multi-tenant structure that houses major aerospace contractors, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, per Wikipedia.
That production line has kept moving since the astronauts splashed down. On April 20, 2026, ten days after splashdown, Michoud workers rolled out the 212-foot Space Launch System core stage for the Artemis III mission, loading it onto NASA's Pegasus barge for the 900-mile journey to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, according to the Associated Press. The next phase of the Artemis mission is planned for 2028 and aims to achieve a human lunar-landing milestone not accomplished since 1972.
Building Toward the Next Landing
NASA's updated Artemis architecture targets 2027 for an orbital test mission in low Earth orbit meant to validate docking between Orion and commercial landers, ahead of the crewed lunar landing planned for Artemis IV in 2028. During a May town hall at Michoud, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told workers that Artemis II was “just the opening act,” outlining plans to push toward a production-line cadence that could eventually extend to building hardware for permanent Moon bases in New Orleans, according to Hoodline's earlier report on that visit.
That faster pace depends on a steady supply of trained technicians, a pressure point local educators are already trying to address. In July, Nunez Community College in Chalmette secured $4 million in Louisiana state funding toward a $9 million aerospace building expansion for its Aerospace Manufacturing Technology program, whose graduates have gone on to work for Boeing and Lockheed Martin and which is tied to regional industry, as detailed in Hoodline's coverage of the Nunez funding announcement. The expansion reflects a broader statewide push into aerospace, with Louisiana officials announcing plans in August for a commercial spaceport spanning 130,000 acres in Vermilion Parish.
For the Michoud workforce, the astronauts' visit served as both celebration and reminder: the hardware that carried four people farther from Earth than any humans since Apollo now has to give way to the next build, and the one after that, as NASA works toward a crewed lunar landing before the end of the decade.
