 Schiro's first year as mayor also coincided with the reopening of the World War II-era Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans East to assemble the first stages of the Saturn V and Saturn IB rockets.Boeing and other NASA contractors hired thousands of highly paid, highly skilled workers, briefly helping New Orleans achieve the rates of job growth by then occurring in other, more rapidly expanding Sun Belt cities.With the steep decline in NASA funding following the early Apollo landings, however, most of these jobs were lost.