The giant moon rocket Artemis 1 blew out the doors of the launch tower elevators (video)
NASA’s powerful New Moon rocket destroyed the launch pad and blew out the elevator doors on the launch tower during its inaugural liftoff last week.
Artemis 1, the first flight of the Artemis program, was launched early Wednesday morning (November 16). Nearly 9 million pounds (4 million kg) of thrust took the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to the final frontier, successfully sending an uncrewed Orion spacecraft toward the Moon.
While the mission is otherwise symbolic, the damage left behind is something NASA is looking closely at to prepare for future missions of the Artemis program, including the next planned mission with humans on board: Artemis 2, scheduled to fly around the moon no later than 2024. .
“The damage we’ve seen is really concerning, just a few areas,” confirmed NASA’s Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager, in a briefing with reporters Monday (November 21).
He added, “It just goes to show, that the environment…isn’t friendlier when you have the most powerful missile in the world going off.”
Pictures: Stunning views of the emergence of NASA’s Artemis 1 moon rocket
Like the space shuttle before it, the Artemis 1 launch used a water suppression system to reduce the amount of damage to the launch surface, which worked as expected. However, the paint was peeled off the roof of Artemis 1’s launch tower due to the massive take-off force, Sarafin said.
The elevators for the launch tower service performed less well, with photos showing a tire buckled around at least one of the two elevators after the doors were ripped off by the shock wave generated by the SLS.
“The elevator system is not working at the moment,” Sarafin said. “The pressure basically blew the doors off our elevators… Right now, the elevators are out of order, and we need to get those elevators back into service.”
NASA officials added that minor damage was done to overhead lines associated with gaseous nitrogen and gaseous helium to service the SLS’s massive tanks, which fooled oxygen sensors on the pad into reading low oxygen levels amid the gas leak.
The directors also found two small aviation items near the pad that shouldn’t have been there: “throat plug material” ejected from the rocket during liftoff (which happens from time to time with rocket launches), and one piece of RTV (sealing dam) from the base of the Orion capsule.
However, it is unclear whether the RTV zapped during launch or erupted during Tropical Storm Nicole, which tore a strip of caulk prior to launch; Mission managers had determined before launch that the RTV problem would not pose a risk.
The damage was so minor that Sarafin described the SLS as a “very clean system,” adding that the missile exceeded its performance goals and that the team would make some changes to Artemis 2.
“It’s about being as safe as possible, given the hostile environment we’re flying into for our astronauts,” he said of mission planning in general, including the launch phase. “We take this very seriously. Flight safety for our astronauts is paramount.”
Elizabeth Howell is co-author of “Why am I taller (Opens in a new tab)? (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book on space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @tweet (Opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @tweet (Opens in a new tab) or Facebook (Opens in a new tab).
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