A giant metal frame standing several yards wide rises up nearly 200 feet inside the Michoud Assembly Facility, NASA’s massive 832-acre space park outside New Orleans.
“What you’re looking at is the largest welding system in the world,” said Jackie Nesselroad. She is leading a team from Boeing that’s welding together the world’s most powerful rocket, the Space Launch System. “It’s about the coolest job on earth.”
SLS is not a rocket that will be reusable, like the one Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin just landed for the second time in a row.
It is not a system like the one that Elon Musk’s SpaceX contracts out to NASA for ferrying supplies to the International Space Station.
Instead, the SLS has one customer and one mission: to take Americans into deep space.