Rising sea levels are threatening the majority of NASA’s launch pads and multi-billion dollar complexes famous for training astronauts and launching historic missions into space. From Cape Canaveral in Florida to mission control in Houston, Texas, the US space agency is busily building seawalls where possible and moving some buildings further inland.
Five of the seven major NASA centers are located along the coast, because being close to the water is a logistical necessity for launching rockets and testing spacecraft.
Many NASA centers have already faced costly damage from encroaching water, coastal erosion and potent hurricanes.
The most iconic launchpad lies in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center, the liftoff point for the Apollo missions to the moon and many space shuttle flights over the past three decades.
‘We are acutely aware that, in the long-term sense, the viability of our presence at Space Coast is in question,’ said Kim Toufectis, a facilities planner in NASA’s Office of Strategic Infrastructure to Gizmodo.
According to NASA’s planning and development office, rising sea levels are the single largest threat to the Kennedy Space Center’s continued operation.
Scientists at the University of Florida say the problem has been ignored until recently.
‘We were a little blind to it, like pre-Katrina New Orleans,’ said one of the researchers, assistant professor Peter Adams of the UF Geological Sciences department.
‘Now that we’ve seen it, we’re sensitive to it.’
Adams and associate professor of geology John Jaeger, who have been studying Cape Canaveral’s dunes and beach since 2009, say the impacts became most apparent after Hurricane Sandy.
‘Sandy got a lot of press up north, but it really did a tremendous amount of damage at Cape Canaveral,’ Jaeger said.
‘Areas that had previously been relatively stable for decades… suddenly they were gone.’
Adams said a combination of climate change-related sea-level rise and increased wave energy is almost certainly to blame.
‘Certainly it’s occurring now,’ he said. ‘Is it affecting NASA infrastructure? The answer is yes.’
Nancy Bray, director of center operations for Kennedy Space Center, said NASA is taking the situation seriously and has plans for dealing with it.
The research came about after NASA partnered with the U.S. Geological Survey and UF to figure out why chronic erosion was happening along a roughly 6-mile stretch of beach between launch pads 39A and 39B – the ones used for Space Shuttle and Apollo missions.
The problem had been occurring for years but seemed to be growing worse, beginning with the spate of hurricanes that struck Florida in 2004.
Faced with the question of what was causing the increased vulnerability in that part of the shoreline, they soon came to the conclusion that the culprits were sea-level rise and wave climate change.
In the short term, NASA has built new dunes to replace the natural ones that were lost on the threatened section of shoreline.
Visitors on tour buses can look out over one of the new dunes from an elevated mound on the beach.
‘Without that secondary dune line, we could have saltwater intrusion at the launch pad,’ Bray said.
Looking further into the future, the agency is taking an approach it calls ‘managed retreat.’ That means if sea-level rise becomes insurmountable, Bray said, it may eventually have to move roads, utilities and perhaps even launch pads – a costly and complex possibility.
Another key NASA site that is succumbing to rising seas is Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, where 16,000 rockets have launched and where sea levels have surged nine inches since it opened in 1945.
Others are Ames Research Center in San Francisco and Langley Research Center in Virginia, which is a $3.5 billion facility with specialized wind tunnels for simulating flight.
‘Retreat is the way to go here, because you just can’t like, get up and move. The infrastructure is too great here,’ said Russell De Young of the NASA science directorate at Langley.
‘They are tearing down buildings that are at the water’s edge and building new structures as far back as we can against the fence of the property line,’ he said.
De Young is among a handful of NASA employees who are tasked with monitoring climate change and analyzing the impacts it would have on NASA facilities.
President Barack Obama in 2009 called on all government agencies to take steps to prepare for climate change.
De Young said the space agency, like other government facilities that find themselves on the coast, are trying to make incremental changes over the coming decades.
‘This is not imminent,’ he said, noting that the forecast at Langley, which is in Hampton, Virginia, is for five feet of sea level rise from the 1980s until the year 2100.
‘With sea level rise you can always manage it, but if a hurricane hits us, that is what worries us. The combination of the two is a devastating blow that we dread.’
