Rising seas threaten to flood launch sites, NASA says

http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/04/us/nasa-launch-sites-rising-sea-levels-feat/index.html?eref=rss_us

By Brandon Griggs, CNN
Updated 3:53 PM ET, Fri September 4, 2015

At Kennedy, the starting point for almost every NASA human space flight, the launch pads and buildings sit just a few hundred feet from the Atlantic Ocean. The same is true at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, an active rocket launch site for NASA's science and exploration missions.

Langley Research Center is on the Back River in Hampton, Virginia, near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Ames Research Center borders the south end of the San Francisco Bay. Johnson Space Center in suburban Houston sits on Clear Lake, an inlet of Galveston Bay.

All of them stand between 5 and 40 feet above mean sea level -- higher, actually, than NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, which sits below sea level behind earthen levees. After Hurricane Katrina, Michoud employees had to pump more than a billion gallons of water out of the facility, NASA says.

Most of Kennedy, NASA's flagship launch site, is built on coastal marshland about 5 to 10 feet above sea level. The high-tide line there has been moving landward for some time, and NASA says conservative climate models project that the sea level off Kennedy will rise 5 to 8 inches by the 2050s.

"Kennedy Space Center may have decades before waves are lapping at the launch pads," coastal geologist John Jaeger of the University of Florida said in NASA's post. "Still, when you put expensive, immovable infrastructure right along the coast, something's eventually got to give."

Given this problem, you might wonder why NASA built so many key facilities so close to coastlines in the first place. The answer is that decades ago, the U.S. government decided to fly most of its rockets and experimental aircraft from the coast because failures happen, and they are less dangerous to the public when they occur over water.

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