New Orleans East is taking a front-row seat in the next era of human spaceflight. Vivace, a Texas-based aerospace company with long ties to NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility, has been tapped to build the primary structure for Starlab. Starlab is a commercial space station backed by Voyager Space and Airbus that aims to be in orbit before the end of the decade.
The contract positions Michoud, already a historic hub for space hardware, at the center of a high-stakes competition to replace the International Space Station and capture a share of the growing commercial space market.
Vivace, founded in 2006 and headquartered in San Antonio, has operated at Michoud since 2012. From its New Orleans East manufacturing center, the company will lead development of Starlab's main aluminum structure, which the project's backers say will be one of the largest integrated pieces ever built for launch into low-Earth orbit.
Starlab is designed to host up to four people at a time that will include a mix of researchers and private space travelers, in orbit. In addition to scientific work in microgravity, the station is being pitched as a platform for in-space satellite manufacturing and as a logistics node for future deep-space missions.
The Starlab venture is led by Colorado-based Voyager Space and European aerospace giant Airbus, with additional partners including Mitsubishi Corp., MDA Space and Palantir Technologies. Strategic collaborators range from Hilton, which has been involved in early habitat design work, to Northrop Grumman and The Ohio State University.
Starlab CEO Marshall Smith framed Vivace's selection as a key milestone in proving the project's seriousness to NASA and other potential customers.
"Starlab is meticulously engineered to deliver scalability, reliability and mission-critical research to our partners," he said in a prepared statement, calling the Michoud manufacturing plan an important step toward turning the paper design into hardware.
For Michoud, the agreement extends a long lineage. The 829-acre facility, owned by NASA, has been a production site for everything from Saturn V rocket stages during the Apollo era to external fuel tanks for the Space Shuttle and core stages for the Space Launch System. Today it hosts NASA operations alongside roughly 20 aerospace and high-tech firms, with Vivace among the most established.
The Starlab work will rely not just on Vivace's floor space and workforce, but also on the technical ecosystem that has grown up around the site. The company said its U.S. government partners at Michoud will provide structural analysis support, specialized testing infrastructure and subject-matter expertise as the design is finalized and full-scale manufacturing begins.
"Leveraging Vivace's facilities in Louisiana, we are proud to contribute to this significant project supporting U.S. and allied leadership in human spaceflight," said Steve Cook, Vivace's chair.
State leaders were quick to tout the announcement as a win for Louisiana's advanced manufacturing ambitions. Gov. Jeff Landry praised the decision to use Michoud as a central element in Starlab's build, saying the partnership underscores the facility's value as a national asset and a driver of local economic activity.
The timing of the deal is no accident. NASA is preparing for life after the International Space Station, which has been continuously occupied since 2000 and is expected to retire in the 2030s. The agency has made clear it does not plan to own and operate the ISS's successor. Instead, in 2021 it launched an initiative to seed privately developed stations that NASA can use as one customer among many while it shifts its own focus toward missions to the moon and Mars.
That policy has sparked a modern space station race among commercial operators. Starlab is one of several competing projects vying for NASA support and future contracts. Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos, and Sierra Space are co-developing a station concept called Orbital Reef. Axiom Space is pursuing its own design, beginning with modules that will initially attach to the ISS before separating into an independent outpost.
All of these companies are trying to prove that their concepts are technically sound, financially viable and capable of serving both government and commercial users. Securing a manufacturing base at Michoud allows Starlab's backers to point to a concrete industrial plan as they court NASA, international space agencies, universities and private firms interested in microgravity research or in-space production.
If schedules hold, the Starlab station could be operational as soon as 2028, providing an overlap period with the aging ISS and giving NASA and other partners time to transition their experiments and crews.
For New Orleans and Louisiana, the project's significance extends beyond aerospace bragging rights. It signals that Michoud's role is evolving along with the space industry itself. Coming from a site dominated by government-owned vehicles to a mixed environment where public and private missions are built side by side.
As Starlab's design is refined and aluminum frames begin to take shape on the factory floor, Michoud will again be sending large, complex structures skyward. This time, instead of supporting a single national space station, those structures could form part of a global, commercially driven network in orbit—one in which Louisiana's industrial base plays a quietly central role.
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