Boeing Co. will use NASA's Michoud Assembly Center in New Orleans to produce an avionics system that will control the Ares I rocket intended to send astronauts back to the moon.

On Wednesday, NASA awarded Boeing a $799.5 million contract to produce the system that will provide guidance, navigation and control for the rocket until it reaches orbit.

Chicago-based Boeing said it expected the project to employ up to 20 production workers at Michoud. About 100 technical personnel will be employed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. for production and engineering support, the company said.

The deal is the final major contract award for the Ares I program that will launch the Orion capsule and service module. Those will be built at Michoud by Lockheed Martin Corp.

Currently, Bethesda-Md.-based Lockheed Martin builds the giant external fuel tanks for the space shuttle program that is scheduled to end in 2010. Lockheed Martin officials said about 200 workers are now employed in the Orion program. The number is expected to grow to about 500 over the next two years.

In August, Boeing received a contract worth up to $1.13 billion to build the first stage of the Ares I at Michoud. Boeing has said the project will employ "several hundred" New Orleans production employees, while NASA has pegged the number at about 250 starting in late 2008.

The first stage of the Ares I rocket will be produced by Alliant Techsystems of Minneapolis.

Michoud currently has about 1,000 workers on the shuttle tanks project, another 1,000 that provide support services for Lockheed Martin and another 400 that operate the facility for NASA.

During the 1960s, Boeing used Michoud to produce the first stage of the Saturn booster, a key component of the Apollo program that first took astronauts to the moon. Michoud, which received its initial fuel tank contract in 1973, had 5,000 employees at the height of the shuttle program in the 1980s.

If all goes well, the first test flight of Orion will occur in 2014 and astronauts could return to the moon by late 2019 or 2020 with possible later missions to Mars, NASA has said.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)