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The Artemis I moon rocket is still standing after battling Hurricane Nicole, which made landfall as a Category 1 storm roughly 70 miles south from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida overnight. The $4.1 billion rocket rode out the storm while sitting exposed on its launchpad.
It’s not yet clear how the hurricane affected the rocket, called the Space Launch System, or the Orion spacecraft that’s currently sitting atop it, but initial inspections have begun.
“Our team is conducting initial visual check-outs of the rocket, spacecraft, and ground system equipment with the cameras at the launchpad. Camera inspections show very minor damage such as loose caulk and tears in weather coverings. The team will conduct additional onsite walk down inspections on the vehicle soon,” according to a Thursday afternoon statement from Jim Free, associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate.
“Teams monitored SLS and Orion remotely during the storm and successfully maintained purges and other essential support,” the statement reads.
Leading up to Hurricane Nicole’s landfall, wind gusts and potential debris were concerns for the Artemis I mission team. The rocket is designed to withstand 85 mile-per-hour (74.4-knot) winds with some margin, NASA officials noted in a Tuesday statement.
“While wind sensors at the launch pad detected peak wind gusts up to 82 miles per hour (71 knots) at the 60-foot level, this is within the rocket’s capability. We anticipate clearing the vehicle for those conditions shortly,” Free said.
But Thursday evening, a NASA spokesperson confirmed to CNN that sensors at the 467-foot (142-meter) level of the lightning towers indicated that the wind peak did reach up to 100 miles per hour (87 knots) at that location.
At 5:15 a.m. ET Thursday, sensors located on one of the lightning towers surrounding the rocket also clocked wind speeds of 75 miles per hour (65 knots), with gusts as high as 100 miles per hour (87 knots). Data from some of the sensors, which are owned by NASA and the US Space Force, is available on the National Weather Service’s website.
That website says the sensor producing that data is 7 feet (2 meters) off the ground. However, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Melbourne, Florida, forecast office told CNN that is inaccurate. The actual height of the sensor is 230 feet (70 meters), which should provide accurate readings for the types of winds the 322-foot-tall (98-meter-tall) rocket endured.
NASA did not respond to requests for comment about that detail on Thursday.
The space agency decided to roll the SLS rocket out to its launchpad last week as the storm was still an unnamed system brewing off the East Coast. At the time, officials had been expecting the storm to bring sustained winds of around 29 miles per hour (25 knots) with gusts of up to 46 miles per hour (40 knots). Those were deemed to be well within the predetermined limits of what the rocket can withstand, according to comments from Mark Burger, a launch weather officer with the US Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron, at a NASA news conference on November 3.
“The National Hurricane Center just has a 30% chance of it becoming a named storm,” Burger said at the news conference. “However, that being said, the models are very consistent on developing some sort of a low pressure.”
But the storm did grow into a named system on Monday, three days after the rocket was rolled out to the launchpad.
“We took the decision to keep Orion and SLS at the launch pad very seriously, reviewing the data in front of us and making the best decision possible with high uncertainty in prediction the weather four days out,” according to the Thursday statement from Free. “With the unexpected change to the forecast, returning to the Vehicle Assembly Building was deemed to be too risky in high winds, and the team decided the launch pad was the safest place for the rocket to weather the storm.”
Transporting the mega moon rocket between the launchpad and the Vehicle Assembly Building is no small feat. It usually takes about three days of preparations before the maneuver can occur, and there are a limited number of rollbacks the mission team can perform. The slow 4-mile (6.4-kilometer) ride aboard an Apollo-era giant NASA crawler takes 10 to 12 hours in favorable conditions. If the rocket had to be rolled back as a storm approached, it could only handle sustained winds less than 46 miles per hour (40 knots).
The storm’s strength was unusual, with Nicole becoming the first hurricane to strike the United States in November in nearly 40 years.
To prepare for the storm, NASA said in a statement Tuesday that its teams powered down the Orion spacecraft as well as the rocket’s side boosters and other components. Engineers also installed a hard cover to protect the rocket’s launch abort system window and took other steps to prepare the ground systems.
The SLS rocket had been stowed away for weeks after issues with fuel leaks thwarted the first two launch attempts, and then Hurricane Ian rolled through Florida, forcing the rocket to vacate the launchpad in September.
NASA officials returned the rocket to the launchpad last week with the goal of working toward a third launch attempt on November 14, but that schedule shifted to November 16 as NASA acknowledged the looming threat of Hurricane Nicole on Tuesday. It’s not clear if the launch date will be moved again as NASA looks for damage.
The overall goal of NASA’s Artemis program is to return humans to the moon for the first time in half a century. And the Artemis I mission — expected to be the first of many — will lay the groundwork, testing the rocket and spacecraft and all their subsystems to ensure they are safe enough for astronauts to fly to the moon and back.