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The Artemis I moon rocket is still standing after battling Hurricane Nicole, which made landfall as a Category 1 storm about 70 miles south of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida overnight. The $4.1 billion rocket rode out the storm while on display at the launch site.
It’s not yet clear how the hurricane affected the rocket, called the Space Launch System, or the Orion spacecraft currently atop it, but initial inspections have begun.
“Our team performs initial visual checks of the rocket, spacecraft and ground system equipment with the cameras at the launch site. Camera inspections show very minor damage such as loose caulking and tears in the weatherstripping. The team will conduct additional field inspections of the vehicle shortly,” according to a statement Thursday afternoon from Jim Free, associate administrator of NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate.
“Teams monitored SLS and Orion remotely during the storm and successfully maintained clearances and other essential support,” the statement said.
Until Hurricane Nicole made landfall, wind gusts and potential debris were concerns for the Artemis I mission team. The rocket is designed to withstand winds of 85 miles per hour (74.4 knots) with some margin, officials noted NASA in a statement on Tuesday.
“While wind sensors on the launch pad detected peak wind gusts of up to 82 mph (71 knots) at the 60-foot level, this is within the rocket’s capabilities. We expect to clear the vehicle for these conditions soon,” Free said.
However, on Thursday night, a NASA spokesman confirmed to CNN that sensors at the 467-foot (142-meter) level of the lightning towers showed that winds peaked at 100 miles per hour (87 knots) at that location.
At 5:15 am ET Thursday, sensors located on one of the lightning towers surrounding the rocket also recorded wind speeds of 75 miles per hour (65 knots), with gusts up to 100 miles per hour (87 knots). Data from some of the sensors, owned by NASA and the US Space Force, is available on the National Weather Service website.
This site says the sensor that produces this data is 7 feet (2 meters) off the ground. But a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s forecast office in Melbourne, Florida, told CNN that’s inaccurate. The sensor’s actual height is 230 feet (70 meters), which should provide accurate measurements of the types of winds the 322-foot (98-meter) rocket endured.
NASA did not respond to requests for comment on that detail Thursday.
The space agency decided to launch the SLS rocket at its launch site last week as the storm was still an unidentified system forming off the East Coast. At the time, officials expected the storm to bring sustained winds of about 29 miles per hour (25 knots) with gusts up to 46 miles per hour (40 knots). It was thought to be within the predetermined limits of what the rocket can withstand, according to comments by Mark Burger, a launch weather officer with the US 45th Weather Squadron, at a Nov. 3 NASA news conference.
“The National Hurricane Center has just a 30 percent chance of becoming a named storm,” Berger said at the news conference. “However, having said that, the models are very consistent in the development of some kind of low pressure.”
But the storm developed into a named system on Monday, three days after the missile was launched from the launch site.
“We took very seriously the decision to keep Orion and SLS on the launch pad, looking at the data in front of us and making the best decision possible with high uncertainty in the weather forecast four days out,” according to a statement Thursday from the Free. “With the unexpected change in the forecast, the return to the Vehicle Assembly Building was deemed too dangerous in the strong winds, and the team decided that the launch pad was the safest place for the rocket to ride out the storm.”
Transporting the large moon rocket between the launch pad and the vehicle assembly building is no small feat. It usually takes about three days of preparation to execute the maneuver, and there is a limited number of flips the mission team can perform. The slow 4-mile (6.4 km) ride on a NASA Apollo-era giant crawler takes 10 to 12 hours in favorable conditions. If the rocket had to flip as a storm approached, it could only handle sustained winds of less than 46 miles per hour (40 knots).
The strength of the storm was unusual, with Nicole becoming the first hurricane to hit the United States in November in nearly 40 years.
To prepare for the storm, NASA said in a statement Tuesday that its teams destroyed the Orion spacecraft as well as the rocket’s side boosters and other components. Engineers also installed a hard cover to protect the missile’s launch abort system window and took other steps to prepare ground systems.
The SLS rocket had been stored for weeks after problems with fuel leaks prevented the first two launch attempts, and then Hurricane Ian swept through Florida, forcing the rocket to evacuate the launch site in September.
NASA officials returned the rocket to the launch site last week with the goal of working toward a third launch attempt on Nov. 14, but that schedule was pushed back to Nov. 16 as NASA acknowledged the imminent threat of Hurricane Nicole on Tuesday. It is unclear whether the launch date will be moved back as NASA searches 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’re safe enough for astronauts to fly to the Moon and back.
