Space shuttle model
A model rocket serves as a memento of New Orleans’s role in US space exploration.
The Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans East has played a significant role in space exploration since it was acquired by NASA in 1961. In the 1960s Michoud was one of several NASA facilities that manufactured components of the Saturn rockets used in the Apollo space program, which first took humans to the moon. Following the end of the Apollo program, Michoud was utilized by NASA contractors Martin Marietta and later Lockheed Martin to produce the largest physical element used in the space shuttle program: the single-use external fuel tank, which measured more than 154 feet high and 27 feet in diameter. This fuel tank was the sole nonreusable component of a space shuttle. Between the 1970s and 2010, a total of 137 external fuel tanks were produced by the Michoud facility.
Robert G. Williams (1929–2004) was a native of Murphysboro, Illinois, who obtained a degree in mechanical engineering from Indiana Tech following his Army service in World War II and the Korean War. He worked on both the Saturn rocket program and the space shuttle program at the Michoud facility beginning in the 1960s, retiring in 1992 as chief facilities engineer. In 2021, an Illinois auction firm hosted an online sale featuring the contents of a Murphysboro home, which included numerous artifacts from Williams’s career with the space program. An eBay seller acquired a small group of materials that included several NASA publications, news clippings related to the Michoud facility, certificates Williams received from NASA contractors Boeing and Martin Marietta, and a painted wooden model of the space shuttle. HNOC purchased the group in 2024.
This space shuttle model measures 24 inches in height and is made of four parts: the orbiter, the external fuel tank, and two rocket boosters. It is notable that the model’s external fuel tank is painted white, likely dating the model to early production of the single-use external fuel tanks. The tanks were painted white only for the first two shuttle launches, because engineers initially believed that the paint would protect the underlying structure from UV rays. They later realized that painting the tanks, which weighed more than 77,000 pounds when empty, added more than 600 extra pounds and proved unnecessary to protect the structure.
By Aimee Everrett, curator of manuscripts
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