The Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) is an 832-acre (1.3 sq mi; 3.4 km2) manufacturing complex owned by NASA in New Orleans East, a section of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the United States. Organizationally it is part of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, and is currently a multi-tenant complex to allow commercial and government contractors, as well as government agencies, to use the site. MAF is one of the largest manufacturing plants in the world with 43 environmentally controlled acres—174,000 m2 (1,870,000 sq ft)—under one roof, and it employs more than 4,200 people. From September 1961 to the end of the Apollo program in December 1972 the site was utilized by Chrysler Corporation to build the first stages of the Saturn I and Saturn IB, later joined by Boeing Corporation to build the first stage of the Saturn V rockets. From September 5, 1973, to September 20, 2010, the factory was used for the construction of the Space Shuttle's external fuel tanks by Martin Marietta Corporation. In 2012, the parts of the facility dedicated to rocket construction were renamed the Chris A. Hadfield Rocket Factory (CAHRF), after the factory's former employee and Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield.
