Disaster management done right: a disaster plan helped two NASA facilities prepare for the worst of Hurricane Katrina and provide support to communities in need.(Homeland Security)

Security Management, July, 2007 by Straw, Joseph

HURRICANE KATRINA might have caught most of the federal government flat-footed, but not its biggest contractor, Lockheed Martin.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The company's Space Systems division operates at two major sites on the Gulf Coast: NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans and the John C. Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

Lockheed Martin runs the Michoud plant for NASA, where the agency manufactures the Space Shuttle's massive external fuel tanks. The 15-story tanks are built inside the plant, transferred onto barges, then--weather permitting--floated down the Mississippi across the Gulf of Mexico and around Key West, Florida, en route to Cape Canaveral.

The Stennis Space Center is NASA's largest rocket...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.