NASA Applied Spaceflight Fabrication Facility (Building 70), Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas

NASA’s spaceflight hardware machinists in Houston are about to get one roof. HITT Contracting turned dirt Oct. 27, 2026, on the Applied Spaceflight Fabrication Facility at Johnson Space Center, also known as Building 70, and announced the groundbreaking Nov. 3. Construction is expected to wrap in August 2028.

The building will pull machining equipment and crews that are now scattered across several JSC venues into a single high-bay shop that produces components for NASA missions. It’s also the first phase of a larger engineering complex the agency plans on the campus.

Project Scope

Building 70 is a greenfield job of about 37,625 square feet. Bid documents summarized by ConstructConnect describe a 42-foot-tall high-bay industrial building on a site with no previous structures, framed in site-cast concrete composite tilt-wall panels on a slab on grade, with drilled-shaft deep foundations. The design carries provisions for future growth and expansion. Bid options covered outdoor covered storage, extra windows, an additional mezzanine, utility modifications, tree mitigation and foundation changes.

HITT expects about 250 of its own staff and trade partners to work the site over the life of the project, vice president Todd Hudson told Construction Dive. The contractor says it’ll work with NASA on the shop’s specialized equipment and operational requirements, which is where precision manufacturing buildings tend to get complicated: slab flatness, vibration, crane capacity and clean power for machine tools all have to be right on day one.

The award sits under the Johnson Space Center Multiple Award Construction Contract, a vehicle worth up to $300 million that NASA split among seven firms in June 2026, with task orders competed between them. HITT has picked up a second task order under the same umbrella to renovate Building 13 South while operations there continue.

Why It Matters

Most of JSC’s building stock dates to the Apollo era, and NASA has been chipping away at it with consolidation projects rather than one grand rebuild. A purpose-built machine shop is a practical move. Spreading lathes and mills across old buildings costs time on every part that has to move between them.

Tilt-wall on drilled shafts is a sensible, fast choice on Clear Lake’s clay soils, and 22 months from dirt to completion is a reasonable schedule for a building this size. The open question is what the larger engineering complex looks like and when it’s funded. Building 70 is phase one of a plan NASA hasn’t fully described yet, so this shop will be the test of whether the multiple-award approach can move JSC’s backlog faster than single-project procurement did.

Project Team & Details