Artemis I shook off hurricane fears to display rocket’s heartiness

The fears that damage from 100 mph winds from Hurricane Nicole would derail NASA’s Artemis I launch proved unfounded as the $4.1 billion Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft blasted off from Kennedy Space Center early Wednesday morning.

“We have a priority-one mission in play right now. We had the rocket do its job and deliver the spacecraft to the point of trans-lunar injection,” said Artemis mission manager Mike Sarafin in a post-launch briefing. “The quote I heard was ‘dead on.’ But there was a word inserted between ‘dead on’ that I won’t share with you here in this setting. But that just shows the precision of the system.”

The SLS rocket used a record-setting 8.8 million pounds of thrust between its core stage and two solid rocket boosters to send into space Orion along with an upper stage that added its own 18-minute burn that sent the capsule even farther away from the planet’s gravitational pull and on its way to the moon like clockwork.

The uncrewed Orion capsule is at the outset of a nearly 26-day mission to circle the moon several times in an orbit very different than the Apollo missions from 50 years ago that will bring it as close as 80 miles and as far as 40,000 miles away from the lunar surface. Heading out more than 268,000 miles from Earth at its farthest point will give it a record for a human-rated spacecraft.

That also means Orion will come back faster to Earth with a planned splashdown on Dec. 11 setting human-rated re-entry speed records of 24,500 mph generating heat near 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

But the job isn’t over. The spacecraft must move through the Van Allen Radiation Belts and past the Earth’s magnetic field with more in-space maneuvers to prove out through the use of the European-built service module attached to Orion as well as communications using NASA’s Deep Space Network.

Then comes the return trip that will ensure the new heat shield is up to snuff.

“We’ve bought down a lot of risk today, but we’ve got a lot of mission ahead of us,” Sarafin said. “We are on day one of a 26-day mission.”

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson tempered expectations despite things going smoothly since launch so far.

“Things will go wrong,” he said. “This is a new system, and it’s a test flight, and so we’re going to expect those things to go wrong and then we’re going to try to work ‘em.”

However, if all goes well, it sets up Artemis II planned for as early as May 2024, a mission that will let humans strap into Orion for a mission to orbit the moon. That would be followed by Artemis III as early as 2025, which would send Orion to rendezvous with a version of the in-development SpaceX Starship to bring at least two astronauts, including the first woman, to the lunar surface, marking the first time since 1972 that humans set foot on the moon.

But before humans get on board, Orion needs to finish this first mission.

“There’s definitely relief that we’re underway,” Sarafin said. “But we also have a heightened sense of awareness ... I personally am not going to rest well until we get safely to splashdown and recovery.”

The path to the Artemis I launch was a tortuous one since the program’s announcement in 2012. Originally targeting 2016 for the first launch, Artemis I comes instead six years later after skyrocketing costs and delays.

“It feels great to get the rocket out and it feels even better to have it performed the way it did,” said SLS program manager John Honeycutt. “It’s been a long time coming, but if I think you study history and look back on it, these things don’t happen overnight and they all followed similar timelines.”

While some of the delays came from manufacturers including the core stage’s prime contractor Boeing, other factors added to the timeline including COVID-19 and even a series of hurricane threats.

The core stage endured winds from Hurricane Zeta when it was testing at Stennis Space Center in 2020, part of a year in which the Gulf Coast and NASA facilities shut down because of threats from five hurricanes and a tropical storm.

And this year, Artemis I’s bad hurricane luck continued with NASA choosing to roll back a launch-ready rocket to the safety of KSC’s Vehicle Assembly Building in September to avoid the threat of Hurricane Ian, which ended up carving a path in between Launch Pad 39-A and 39-B at Kennedy Space Center.

NASA then chose to return to the launch pad in early November despite what was at the time only a small tropical threat that ended up turning into the major headache that was Hurricane Nicole.

While Nicole’s growing winds were a concern, NASA managers decided to remain on the pad and rely on the heartiness of the SLS, which was cleared to endure 85 mph sustained winds at the pad.

Gusts topped 100 mph and Hurricane Nicole did do some damage including stripping away some silicone caulk near the base of Orion. NASA managers, though, said the risk of debris falling away and damaging parts below Orion during launch was low enough to move forward.

In the end, the spacecraft shrugged off the threat and made it into space in a monstrous nighttime display in front of thousands of spectators across the Space Coast.

Sarafin did say some small issues, which he referred to as “funnies,” arose on launch including evidence of some debris as well as some faulty indicators and flight instrumentation that “dropped out” during the ascent.

“Those were you know, at this stage of the game, relatively benign,” he said. “We pressed all the way through.”

Sarafin ticked off all of the launch accomplishments including all of the separation events for the rocket including the boosters, fairings, jettison of the launch abort system, shutdown the four RS-25 engines and jettison of the core stage. That was followed by the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage performing a maneuver to raise Orion’s orbit and then knocking out the trans-lunar injection burn before it too fell away from the spacecraft.

These “choreographed events” all came while deploying Orion’s solar arrays, setting up the rest of the flight.

“We’ve got to take it day by day. We’re going to learn stuff as we go,” Sarafin said. “We’ve got 1000s and 1000s of measurements and data and engineering measurements we’re going to take along the way to ensure we understand the margins. And if they’re a little bit less than we thought they were, we need to take those into account before we put humans on board. ... If we’re lucky, and we fly right down the middle, that’ll be a great day.”

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