Powerful New Orleans tornado damages NASA's Michoud rocket factory
UPDATE: Feb. 8, 2017, 5:19 p.m. EST All 3,500 of NASA's Michoud employees have been accounted for, according to the space agency, with five suffering from minor injuries.
Hardware at the facility including pieces of NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft do not appear to have sustained obvious damage.
According to NASA, about 40 to 50 percent of buildings at the facility have been damaged, with at least five sustaining significant damage.
Our original story is below:
A large tornado ripped through New Orleans and the surrounding area Tuesday, leaving a swath of devastation in its wake and damaging NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in the city.
It's unclear how much damage the facility, which is helping to manufacture NASA's next mega-rocket, sustained.
"At 11:25 a.m. CST, a tornado impacted NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. At this time, only minor injuries have been reported and NASA employees and other tenants are being accounted for," NASA spokesperson Tracy McMahan said in an email.
"There is still a threat of severe weather in the area and emergency officials are continuing to monitor the situation to ensure the safety of onsite personnel," McMahan added.
"The onsite Michoud emergency response team is also conducting damage assessments of buildings and facilities."
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Photos and videos posted to social media show overturned cars and buildings stripped of siding on the NASA campus, located to the northeast of downtown New Orleans, on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain.
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During the space shuttle era, Michoud was responsible for assembling and testing the external tanks used to store the propellant that would power shuttles into orbit.
Today, Michoud is helping to test and build hardware for NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft, designed to deliver humans to deep space destinations like the moon and Mars in the coming decades. The SLS rocket is slated to be the most powerful the agency has ever built.
NASA is not yet sure whether any of the spacecraft hardware at Michoud was damaged during the storm.
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According to the National Weather Service, at least three tornadoes touched down in Louisiana as a result of the severe storms. The state's governor declared a state of emergency on Tuesday afternoon as storms continued to hit parts of the state.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
