by NASA’s powerful new moon rocket damaged its launch pad and blew out elevator doors in the launch tower during its inaugural launch last week.
Artemis 1, the first flight of the Artemis program, launched early Wednesday morning (Nov. 16). Nearly 9 million pounds (4 million kg) of thrust propelled the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to its final frontier, where it successfully sent an unmanned Orion spacecraft to the moon.
While the mission is otherwise nominal, the damage left behind is something NASA is watching closely as it prepares for future missions of the Artemis program, including the next planned human-carrying mission: Artemis 2, which will not arrive until around the world at the earliest. moon will fly. 2024.
“The damage we’ve seen involves really only a few areas,” NASA’s Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager, emphasized during a news conference with reporters on Monday (Nov. 21).
“It just goes to show,” he added, “that the environment… isn’t the friendliest when you’re launching the world’s most powerful rocket.”
In photos: Beautiful view of NASA’s Artemis 1 moon rocket debut
Like the space shuttle before it, the launch of Artemis 1 used a water suppression system to reduce the amount of damage to the launch deck, which worked as expected. Nevertheless, the paint was peeling off the deck of Artemis 1’s launch tower due to the sheer force of the launch, Sarafin said.
The launch tower maintenance elevators fared less well, with photos showing a lopsided framing around at least one of the two elevators after the doors were ripped away by the shock wave generated by the SLS.
“The lift system is not working at the moment,” explains Sarafin. “The pressure basically blew the doors off our elevators… right now the elevators are unusable and we need to get them back up and running.”
Minor damage was done to the pneumatic lines associated with gaseous nitrogen and gaseous helium to service the massive SLS tanks, which tricked pillow oxygen sensors into reading low oxygen levels amid the leaking gas, NASA officials added please.
Managers also found two small flight items near the pad that shouldn’t have been there: “throat plug material” that was expelled from the rocket during launch (which happens from time to time in rocket launches), and a piece of RTV (insulating seal) . from the base of the Orion capsule.
However, it is unclear whether the RTV flew off during launch or came loose during Tropical Storm Nicole, which loosened a strip of caulk prior to launch; mission managers had determined before launch that the RTV issue would pose no risk.
The damage was so minor that Sarafin characterized SLS as “a very clean system,” adding that the missile exceeded its performance targets and that the team will make some changes for Artemis 2.
“This is 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 the co-author of “Why am I taller (opens in new tab)(ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a space medicine book. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
