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NASA

Artemis Takeoff Causes Severe Damage To NASA Launch Pad (futurism.com) 142

Posted by BeauHD from the what-don't-they-want-us-to-see dept.
SonicSpike shares a report from Futurism: It appears that NASA's Artemis 1 rocket launch pad caught way more damage than expected when it finally took off from Kennedy Space Center last week. As Reuters space reporter Joey Roulette tweeted, a source within the agency said that damage to the launchpad "exceeded mission management's expectations," and per his description, it sounds fairly severe.

"Elevator blast doors were blown right off, various pipes were broken, some large sheets of metal left laying around," the Reuters reporter noted in response to SpaceNews' Jeff Foust, who on Friday summarized a NASA statement conceding that the launchpad's elevators weren't working because a "pressure wave" blew off the blast doors. Shortly after the launch, NASA acknowledged that debris was seen falling off the rocket, though officials maintain that it caused "no additional risk" to the mission. In spite of those sanguine claims, however, reporters revealed that NASA seemed very intent on them not photographing the Artemis launch tower -- and now, with these preliminary reports about how messed up it seems to have gotten, we may know why.
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Artemis Takeoff Causes Severe Damage To NASA Launch Pad More

Artemis Takeoff Causes Severe Damage To NASA Launch Pad

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  • What's the point? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by larwe ( 858929 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @02:06AM (#63073194)
    There's no way imagery of this won't come out anyway. The ability to save face is severely limited.

    • Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by algaeman ( 600564 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @02:28AM (#63073214)
      They want to get a couple days of assessment to get a clear idea what happened before the armchair engineers on Slashdot begin their critiques.

      • Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Funny)

        by Required Snark ( 1702878 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @02:57AM (#63073236)
        Too late!

      • Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Funny)

        by gosso920 ( 6330142 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @08:25AM (#63073654)
        The front end fell off.
      • To true. What amuses me, as a person who saw Apollo missions launch, is how this seems to be setting everyones hair on fire. A Saturn V launch always caused damage. Large launch vehicles always do. Heck, the blast deflector under the Saturn S-1C used to loose a foot of concrete after every launch due to the output of the F-1 engines. This is no big deal, so chill people. This is what happens when one launches big rockets; things that stay behind get damaged... a lot!

    • Washington DC is involved, the substance is not as critical as the timing, and politicians are better with timing than they are with substance anyway.

      Bad news by any agency of the Federal Government will frequently come out after 5PM east coast time (after the networks have broadcast their evening news). The hope is that the press will forget about it over night if they ever notice it in the first place, and failing that, the hope is that some even will happen in Europe that will be more interesting when th

    • Maybe it's because they wanted to show their own pictures first? -> https://www.space.com/artemis-... [space.com]

  • Follow the Musk playbook (Score:5, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @02:13AM (#63073198)

    Just refer to it as Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly and act like it's no big deal.

    • Re:Follow the Musk playbook (Score:5, Informative)

      by Taskmage ( 191493 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @03:17AM (#63073256)

      Well, a RUD that is 50/50 expected usually is no big deal. Otherwise you would not risk a RUD.

      If we are talking about the starship booster, a RUD on the pad IS a big deal. With the amount of propellant involved it would cause severe damage to the pad (and not only the pad), probably setting things back by half a year. At least that is what Elon Musk said about that topic...

      That is also a part of the reason why SpaceX has slowed down testing and why they switched from "forge ahead and test it till it breaks" to "one slow step after the other".

      Basically, SpaceX is currently testing what NASA has (obviously) not tested (enough): stage 0 (tanking and pad/launch mount).
      And they found out that the damage to the pad is a problem - something NASA only found out AFTER the launch.

      So may i ask, who is risking a RUD here and has not done enough testing? NASA or SpaceX/Musk?

      As a side note:
      The damage to the pad is exactly the problem SpaceX is currently working on. The last booster static fire test, with only 14 out of 33 engines at once, caused severe damage to the launch mount (and especially the concrete below it). And even so static fire is a lot more damaging than a real launch, their target is rapid reuse, while NASA now has years to repair the pad before the next launch. So, to be fair, SpaceX has a reason to prevent damage to the pad, while for NASA it doesn't really matter.

      • And they found out that the damage to the pad is a problem - something NASA only found out AFTER the launch.

        So may i ask, who is risking a RUD here and has not done enough testing? NASA or SpaceX/Musk?

        As a side note:
        The damage to the pad is exactly the problem SpaceX is currently working on. The last booster static fire test, with only 14 out of 33 engines at once, caused severe damage to the launch mount (and especially the concrete below it). And even so static fire is a lot more damaging than a real launch, their target is rapid reuse, while NASA now has years to repair the pad before the next launch. So, to be fair, SpaceX has a reason to prevent damage to the pad, while for NASA it doesn't really matter.

        Well, from NASA's perspective, the moment the rocket starts firing the pad has done it's job and is of limited concern. And if the pad could handle Artemis without damage that's awesome. If it couldn't.... well they were going to need a new pad anyway.

    • 1. You're using your own money, rather than taxpayer money.

      2. You're taking MONTHS to develop both an entirely new rocket architecture and an entirely new launch facility design, rather than 12 to 17 years of basically recycling what you've done before and are expected to know how to do.

      Oh, and incidentally, "RUD" is not just an Elon Musk buzzword, the term has been used in aerospace for many years; it's related to "involuntary conversion" which is how some airlines have referred to the conversion of one of

  • Did the primary buffer panel just fall off my ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by emeade ( 123253 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @02:24AM (#63073206) Homepage

    gorram ship for no apparent reason?

  • Waiting for a better source (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kid CUDA ( 3941133 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @02:25AM (#63073208)

    Futurism isn't a very reliable space news source. It is a sensationalist take at best. Not photographing the launch tower has nothing to do with damage, it is about ITAR regulations. Pieces falling off a rocket can or cannot be nominal, there is not much we can say yet at this stage.

  • Just another chapter in the ML-1 fiasco (Score:5, Informative)

    by quenda ( 644621 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @02:49AM (#63073228)

    NASA has squandered a billion dollars on the Mobile Launcher, which was originally designed for an earlier program, and it not even big enough for the full SLS which is supposed to take astronauts to the moon.
    This was the first use of the 12-year-old billion-dollar platform, and it was expected to be used for Artemis 2 and 3.
    The replacement is already under construction, with completion scheduled for March 2023 (haha).

    https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by trenien ( 974611 )
      Was it really 1 billion dollars ?!

      People juggle these numbers as if they were nothing, but just stop for a second and think : why in hell do you need 1 billion dollars to build a launchpad ? (And yes, I am aware it's more than a slab of concrete, a steel pipes rig and a couple of pipes to bring in the fuel). Still.

      1 billion ? Really ?

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Was it really 1 billion dollars ?!

        Not far off. From wikipedia:

        "This initial construction was completed in August 2010, at a cost of $234 million"

        "NASA decided to modify ML-1 for SLS. In August 2011, it was estimated that modifying ML-1 would cost $54M, modifying the old Space Shuttle launch platform would cost $93M, and building a brand new platform would cost $122M.[13]:ii However, in March 2020, a report from the NASA Inspector General came out, stating that ML-1 is running 3 years behind schedule and had cost $927M in total ($234M for th

      • Oh yes.
        Another great Old Space victory ( for Bechtel shareholders ):

        https://spacenews.com/nasa-aud... [spacenews.com]

    • ML1 was bid at $234 million and, thanks to "cost plus" contracting, gobbled up at least $927 million over TEN YEARS and it leans, and is incapable of supporting the future versions of the SLS rocket.

      ML2 was bid at $383 million and is already up to $960 million, and will probably not be ready for use before 2027 - it's expected to end up at approx $1.3Billion (those next few years are not going to be free) ...

      Although the taxpayers will end up paying for ML2, it may never even get used. There's a fairly goo

  • 2003 vibes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vbdasc ( 146051 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @02:56AM (#63073234)

    "Shortly after the launch, NASA acknowledged that debris was seen falling off the rocket, though officials maintain that it caused "no additional risk" to the mission."

    NASA said the same thing after the 2003 launch of the shuttle Columbia, and we all know how it ended. Thankfully, there is no crew this time, and the rocket is not intended to return to Earth.

    • Re:2003 vibes (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @08:00AM (#63073600) Homepage Journal

      It's normal for things to fall off the rocket during launch. For example, during the Apollo launches you could see ice falling off. The ice formed due to the low temperature of the liquids inside the rocket.

      It really depends what exactly fell off, and if it did any damage. The foam that doomed Columbia had actually fallen off many times before and done damage, just not bad enough to doom the craft. Because Artemis doesn't have bits sticking out lower down like the Shuttle's wings, the chance of falling debris doing any serious damage is much smaller.

      • This launch proved Artemis actually has bits all over the place - in the form of launch tower components. They'll need to either make sure that a normal launch doesn't create flying debris or, given that the exhaust creates circulating air currents that can move small projectiles far faster than the rocket rises, they will need to perform some very careful study to prove that none of those circulating projectiles can strike and penetrate the rocket during liftoff. It might not pose any danger to the astrona

  • Spin it (Score:4, Funny)

    by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @03:14AM (#63073250)
    Our rocket is so powerful it blows up the launch pads from which it takes off. Not like those puny Falcon 9s which land on a floating piece of steel.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      SpaceX presumably has the same problem. They are using multiple smaller engines rather than fewer big ones like Artemis, but they still need to lift a lot of mass which means a lot of energy being directed towards the launch pad.

  • The real reason for the photo ban (Score:5, Informative)

    by hackertourist ( 2202674 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @03:33AM (#63073282)

    The ban has nothing to do with the tower damage. If it had, they wouldn't be putting out press releases describing the damage.
    The ban was there because of ITAR. Specifically, the umbilical connector plates fall under ITAR.

    • The pressure wave was enough to blow in the elevator doors and do a little damage inside te shaft, disabling the elevator. Most of the rest of the "damage'" was cosmetic. Only someone desperate for clicks would call this damage "severe". Disabling the elevator IS annoying though, because it slows down the reset process. (the workers gotta use the stairs!)

      To see what "severe launch pad damage" looks like, go watch some old footage of rockets that lift off then fall back on the pad and explode.

    • I take ITAR seriously, having done weapons system design work in the US aerospace industry, so I'm not just a skeptical armchair jockey here. I have no recollection of NASA ever making such rushed statements to the press insisting upon photo bans after shuttle launches. This hurried ban was not announced pre-flight, it was made after the launch - and SLS is not some new-fangled tech, it's shuttle-derived. In fact, the four main engines we just threw into the ocean on this launch were actually flown on the o

  • Oh, nothing of course.
    It will cost the taxpayer.
    The joy of Old Space.

    Cancel SLaSaurus. Stop the CostPlus waste. Invest in New Space.

    • through all NASA activities, the agency generated more than $64.3 billion in total economic output during fiscal year 2019, supported more than 312,000 jobs nationwide, and generated an estimated $7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes throughout the United States.

      Nasa [nasa.gov] contributes back into the economy.
      SpaceX contributes to Elon's egomania.

      • So you think the people work for for free, or the people who use SpaceX to get their satellites in orbit do not use their systems to make money and pay into the economy?

      • NASA does contribute in that way.

        What NASA wastes on Cost Plus contracts for Old Space does not.

  • The pad's not supposed to take off for a start. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Generic User Account ( 6782004 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @03:53AM (#63073302)

    "NASA's Artemis 1 rocket launch pad caught way more damage than expected when it finally took off from Kennedy Space Center last week."

    Wasn't it tied down? Is it made of cardboard or cardboard derivatives? How did that happen?

  • "pictures"? (Score:5, Informative)

    by ruddk ( 5153113 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @03:58AM (#63073306)

    Artemis 1 blastoff 'blows doors' off launch pad elevators - See the aftermath
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • To try and taint any and all positive things in this world.

    • taint any and all positive things

      Having large chunks of metal flying around in an uncontrolled way, very close to thousands of tonnes of propellant and SRBs is not optimal. Especially if NASA is intending to put people on top of that mess.

      The only "positive" is that none of that shrapnel destroyed the rocket. Next time might not be so lucky.

      • Not optimal at all, but did the worst case scenario happen, no it did not. So lets terminate the trail by social media bs and and move forward, lesson learnt

  • It also made a $35 billion hole in their purse.

  • And? (Score:3)

    by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @09:03AM (#63073736)
    I pretty certain they expected the damage.

    Perhaps there is more damage than expected, but they've never launched that monster before, and doing a postmortem on the launch pad will allow the engineers to design and implement mitigation for future launches

    • You're right. Same old same old. Though they indicate their over-engineering is required to prevent things like this, we know it can't. The recording for this one is basically, "whoopsies, there was more damage than expected. We'll need some more money and time to fix this one. We'll also need to have a bit more money and time for the next version because, obviously, we didn't spend enough or work carefully enough on this one."

      • You're right. Same old same old. Though they indicate their over-engineering is required to prevent things like this, we know it can't. The recording for this one is basically, "whoopsies, there was more damage than expected. We'll need some more money and time to fix this one. We'll also need to have a bit more money and time for the next version because, obviously, we didn't spend enough or work carefully enough on this one."

        This is what Engineering is. And it is inescapable. You need to look into the History of the F1 engine and the Saturn 5 rocket. Or the Falcons or the StarShip, or the space shuttle, or the Bell X-Planes, or any effort that pushes the envelope.

        The possible exception is the Hoover Dam, which was so over-engineered that it was as close to 100 percent perfect on the first try as you could get.

        Artemis is indeed pushing the envelope, balls to the wall, and now it needs it's support infrastructure rethought in

        • Oh, I totally agree. It is my engineering approach. Trying to escape it instead of embracing it is the problem. To embrace it, you must test early, test often, and test with full scale articles. That requires an approach that places the article cost above virtually any other consideration because article cost must be an order of magnitude or more less to test in this way. The good news is that can usually be achieved easily because engineers aren't driven to excess when they can test freely.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by caseih ( 160668 )

          And never mind the fact that Musk's engineers are grappling with this same very thorny issue down in Texas right now. Static firing of some of the engines on the Starship booster stage caused damage to the structure that they need to mitigate if they want any hope of turning Starship around quickly.

          • And never mind the fact that Musk's engineers are grappling with this same very thorny issue down in Texas right now. Static firing of some of the engines on the Starship booster stage caused damage to the structure that they need to mitigate if they want any hope of turning Starship around quickly.

            This is accurate. And just imagine when all 30 fire off. And when a fully loaded Starship spends extra time near t he ground - lots of damage to be done.

            For the interested, take a look at vids of the Space Shuttle launch, and compare it to the Saturn V moon launches. It take a lot longer to clear the gantry on the Saturn V. A huge amount of weight. A loaded fully powered Starship will spend a relative lot of time with it's 30 engines impinging on it's launch pad.

            And then there is the rocket equation.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tragedy ( 27079 )

          The possible exception is the Hoover Dam, which was so over-engineered that it was as close to 100 percent perfect on the first try as you could get.

          Depends on what standards you're using. By modern safety standards, with about 100 people killed to build it, it would be a bit of a disaster.

          • The possible exception is the Hoover Dam, which was so over-engineered that it was as close to 100 percent perfect on the first try as you could get.

            Depends on what standards you're using. By modern safety standards, with about 100 people killed to build it, it would be a bit of a disaster.

            Right, safety wasn't a big thing back in the day. But I'm talking about the over engineered design. Hella lot of concrete and reinforcement there.

            Unfortunately with Rockets, we can't afford to add that much dead weight.

  • I thought I saw an unusual number of parts, junk, debris or whatever flying about through and beyond the exhaust and steam during its launch. I was more impressed with its acceleration and didn't think much of it ... but this makes sense.

  • An attitude of secrecy for the purpose of saving face is bad for the long run. Taken to much greater extremes, this was a hallmark of the USSR's space program as opposed to the USA's Apollo era where if something was going to fail catastrophically, everybody would see it. As bad as the Shuttle era was, at least we could see everything unless the entire launch was classified from assembly-to-landing. One of these uses of secrecy is legit and expected. The other is not. When you start using secrecy to sa

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