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When Hurricane Ida reached land in August, it hit NASA’s Michud, New Orleans installation facility with rain and strong winds and cut off power in the area, forcing the site to run on generators. There are no casualties or parts of the space launch vehicle’s rockets, which are being produced there and are planned for later missions to the moon. But more climate-enhanced storms are sure to come.
While NASA scientists are naturally focused on space, everything they do begins on Earth. As climate change continues, everyone must prepare for the worst-case scenarios. Following a directive from the Biden administration, NASA and other federal agencies published climate action plans last week. They are mainly focused on adapting to a future in which some climate change cannot be avoided.
“Our goal is to look at all the different threats that each site may face,” said Gavin Schmidt, NASA’s senior climate adviser, who contributed to the report. “We are one of the agencies that is not only a victim of climate change, but we are at the forefront of understanding climate change and bringing science to the table to help us make better decisions.”
NASA and other parts of the federal government have tried to develop climate plans during the Obama administration, and they are now reviving those efforts. NASA staff initially made adaptation assessments in 2011, which were updated in 2015, and now they are being updated again. The agency’s recent report highlights five areas of focus, including climate risk planning as new missions progress, adapting infrastructure as much as possible, and providing access to space that could be disrupted if, say, a flooded road delayed the delivery of rocket fuel to the launch site.
With about two-thirds of NASA’s assets 16 feet above sea level – including the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Johnson Space Center in Houston – hurricanes, flood risks and rising seas give the agency much to worry about. “If we look globally and domestically, we have placed many valuable assets, including runways and launch pads, in the coastal zone. “I think it’s very exciting to see NASA move forward with the precision of an engineering-oriented agency,” said Catherine Mach, a climatologist at the University of Miami, who is not affiliated with NASA and who was the lead author of the United Nations. The latest evaluation report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
NASA’s action plan describes the costs of recent extreme weather events, possibly exacerbated by climate change, that come with large repair bills. The Michud assembly plant alone cost nearly $ 400 million after two hurricanes and a tornado. Recent hurricanes and floods have damaged other infrastructure, with more than $ 100 million in damage to many parts of the bay and east coast. In Southern California, a fire in 2009 burned a meter from the perimeter of the jet engine laboratory, which had to be closed. As an indoor site, the JPL may end up with other climatic problems to deal with, including droughts and heat waves.
While NASA will only relocate buildings or launch complexes as a very expensive last resort, the agency is working more on “structural hardening,” making buildings more resilient to extreme weather or power losses so they can work temporarily. offline. “This could mean raising the elevation, adding pumping power and placing barriers. It could be about creating islands. It could be about creating autonomous infrastructure systems, such as self-sufficient energy production, as well as redundancies, ”said Jesse Keenan, a social scientist at Tulane University with experience in adapting to climate change and the environment. (Keenan is not related to the NASA report.)
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