The Biggest Threat to NASA’s Future Is the Ocean

In October 2012, just a few days before Hurricane Sandy slammed into New Jersey, it was churning north past the narrow strip of white sand beach separating NASA’s most celebrated spaceport from the sea.

For several days and nights, heavy storm surge pounded the shoreline, flattening dunes and blowing sand right up to the launchpads. A stone’s throw away from the spot where a Saturn V rocket sent the first humans to the Moon, the ocean took a 100-foot bite out of the beach.

“I think the telling story is that the storm was almost 230 miles offshore, and it still had an impact,” Don Dankert, an environmental scientist at NASA, tells me as we stand with ecologist Carlton Hall atop a rickety metal security tower overlooking Space Coast. It is a hot, breathless day, and the surf laps gently at the deserted shore.

“It makes you wonder what would happen if a storm like that came in much closer, or collided with the coast,” Dankert adds.

If humans keep putting carbon in the atmosphere, eventually, Kennedy won’t be sending anybody into space. It’ll be underwater.

That’s a troubling question for NASA, an agency whose most valuable piece of real estate—the $10.9 billion sandbar called Kennedy Space Center—is also its most threatened. The beating heart of American spaceflight since the Apollo program, Kennedy was, and still is, the only place on US soil where humans can launch into orbit. Today, the center is enjoying a revival, following a few dark years after the space shuttle program was mothballed and crewed launches were outsourced to Russia. The shuttle’s former digs, Launch Pad 39A, is being renovated by commercial spaceflight company SpaceX for the Falcon Heavy, a beast of a rocket designed to ferry astronauts into orbit and beyond. A few miles up the road, Launch Pad 39B is being modified for the SLS rocket, which NASA hopes will send the first humans to Mars.

But a glorious future of bigger and badder rockets is by no means assured. In fact, that future is gravely threatened, not by the budget cuts that NASA speaks speaks often and candidly about, but by climate change. If humans keep putting carbon in the atmosphere, eventually, Kennedy won’t be sending anybody into space. It’ll be underwater.

Aerial view of Kennedy Space Center’s two Launch Pads, 39A and 39B, along with the Launch Control Center, which includes the Vehicle Assembly Building. Launch Pad 41b is located at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Image: Josh Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory/USGS
“We are acutely aware that, in the long-term sense, the viability of our presence at Space Coast is in question,” says Kim Toufectis, a facilities planner in NASA’s Office of Strategic Infrastructure.

There’s a very good reason NASA built Kennedy Space Center, along with four other launch and research facilities, on the edge of the sea. If rockets are going to explode (and in 2016, they still do), we’d rather them explode over water than over people. “To launch to space safely, you have to be at the coast,” says Caroline Massey, assistant director for management operations at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Kennedy’s location, at the southern end of the Merritt Island wildlife refuge and just northwest of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, has a few other perks. Launch pads and other resources are shared with the Air Force, and weather conditions are good year-round. Being close to the equator allows rockets to snag a bigger velocity boost from the rotation of the Earth.

And yet, even as architects were drawing up plans for Kennedy in the early 1960s, NASA knew the spaceport’s exposure—to rising sea levels, hurricanes, and the general wear and tear of the ocean—might one day cause catastrophic damage. “They were absolutely concerned about it,” says Roger Launius, associate director at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and former chief historian for NASA. “But they wanted to launch over water. You don’t want to drop first stages over cities.”
 
Aerial view of Kennedy Space Center’s shoreline before any launchpads were installed, left (1943) and in modern history (2007). Photos Courtesy John Jaeger.

Now, that water is rising. Globally, sea levels have gone up about eight inches since the early 1900s. For the past two decades, the pace of rise has been quickening, in step with accelerated melting on the Greenland ice sheet. At Kennedy, conservative climate models project 5 to 8 inches of sea level rise by mid-century, and up to 15 inches by the 2080s. Models that take changing ice sheet dynamics into account predict as much as fifty inches (4.2 feet) of rise by the 2080s. In an even more dire scenario, Space Coast sees over six feet of rise by the end of the century, causing many of the roads and launchpads, not to mention sewers and buried electrical infrastructure, to become swamped. “I hope we don’t go there,” Hall said.

On top of rising seas, Kennedy faces a stormier future—more extreme hurricanes in the summer and nor’easters in the winter. “We started to notice a real issue with coastal erosion following the 2004 hurricanes,” says John Jaeger, a coastal geologist at the University of Florida.

Jaeger is part of a team of scientists who’ve been studying long-term shoreline recession at Space Coast, which can be traced back to the 1940s through aerial photographs. But while natural erosion has been reshaping Kennedy’s sandy fringes for decades, a recent uptick in powerful storms has Jaeger worried for the future. “As geologists, we know it’s these big events that do all the work,” he says.