How NASA plans to keep Artemis astronauts alive if disaster strikes

EDWARDS, Calif. — If NASA's colossal new moon rocket, slated to launch with astronauts for the first time as soon as tomorrow, explodes on the pad or breaks up as it accelerates through the atmosphere, the space agency has a plan:

Fire a powerful motor affixed to the top of the crew capsule that is literally designed to outrun debris from an exploding rocket, flip the capsule around as it soars through the air, then deploy parachutes to bring the astronauts back to safety.

Reliably pulling off this high-energy yet delicate dance isn't easy. Engineers and scientists across the country spent years developing and testing this Launch Abort System, including many at the Armstrong Flight Research Center, which has spent decades pushing the limits of human flight in Southern California's Mojave Desert.

For the Artemis program, aiming to bring humans back to the moon for the first time in a half-century and prepare for eventually landing people on Mars, NASA tapped the center to help execute two critical tests of the abort system in the 2010s.

In the first, NASA engineers attached the system to a dummy test capsule packed with hundreds of sensors, placed it alongside the glimmering white sand dunes of New Mexico and fired it off to simulate an abort from the launch pad.

In the second, crews headed to the Florida space coast, where they placed the abort system and test capsule on a modified missile. To mimic the conditions of a rocket ascent, they launched the missile and, after it broke the sound barrier, triggered the abort system.

It's these kinds of extreme flight conditions that the Armstrong Flight Research Center specializes in.

Brad Flick, who retired as director of the center on March 20, recalled a poster outside his office depicting the Apollo moon landings: "The poster says, 'Before we did it there, we practiced it here.' And that's what we do."

Southern California's pioneers in human flight

Even before NASA was called NASA, its engineers, scientists and test pilots were pushing the limits of flight in the Mojave Desert.

Out in the middle of current-day Edwards Air Force Base — one of the largest airfields in the world, at some 480 square miles — a small team began the X-plane program, a series of experimental aircraft designed to travel faster, higher and (purposefully) more awkwardly than ever before.

In 1947, with its X-1 plane, the team became the first in the history of human flight to break the sound barrier.

By the early 1960s, the full-fledged flight research center had become a hub of cutting-edge aviation research, thrown into high gear by NASA's "brightest and boldest":

A young pilot by the name of Neil Armstrong was guiding the rocket-powered X-15 on a number of test flights. On one where Armstrong flew above Earth's atmosphere, he struggled to trigger a safety system designed to limit the intense forces pilots experience and overshot his runway by about 45 miles, ending up over Pasadena.

The center was also designing and testing mock-ups of a lunar lander, which Armstrong — now the center's namesake — later used to practice landing on the moon while still here on Earth.

Meanwhile, another plane dubbed the "flying bathtub" was also taking shape at the center. The odd-looking craft essentially aimed to test whether they could fly with no wings, instead generating lift from the body of the plane. To launch it, they attached the plane to a Pontiac convertible and ripped across the nearby lake bed at 120 mph.

The data they got from the experiment informed the design of the Space Shuttle. Instead of relying solely on large wings — which would have needed to be heavy and bulky to survive the extreme conditions of reentry — the shuttle generated a fair amount of lift with its body so it could get by with stubbier, lighter wings. The necessary but perhaps inelegant design earned the Space Shuttle its own nickname: the "flying brick."

Flick didn't indulge in telling any of the "cowboys-in-airplanes stories" he'd heard during his nearly 40 years at the center. However, he noted that it's a special breed that can handle the extremes of the test pilot job — and that it requires some serious risk management across the whole team.

"The safest thing to ever do with an airplane is to never fly it," Flick said. "That's not the business we're in. ... The people in that airplane — be they pilots, or in the cabin — they rely on us to do our jobs well, to keep them safe and alive. That's a responsibility we take very seriously."

Testing astronauts' last resort

The center's experience not only pushing far past the frontiers of flight, but also turning its experimental aircraft into "flying labs" with dozens or hundreds of sensors, has made it key to the success of NASA's space missions over the years.

For the first of the two Artemis abort tests, called Pad Abort-1, the Armstrong Flight Research Center team painted the test capsule; installed the sensors, flight computers, wires and parachutes; and then put the whole system through a series of tests and measurements to make sure it was ready for launch.

Throughout the complex aerial gymnastics of an abort, the distribution of weight matters immensely: A top-heavy capsule performs differently than a bottom-heavy capsule. Unaccounted weight on one side can also set the capsule off-kilter. So the Armstrong team employed a series of tests involving fancy scales and gently tipping the capsule.

Aborts are also intense. The motors that pull the capsule away from the doomed rocket are designed to accelerate from 0 to 500 mph — well over half the speed of sound — in just two seconds. In the process, the capsule shakes pretty aggressively. So the team subjected the capsule to vibrations in the lab to ensure everything would still work after that kind of extreme shaking. It's better to break stuff on the ground than in the air.

The Armstrong team ultimately selected White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico for the pad-abort test. It also oversaw the construction of the launch pad and coordinated operations for the test, which NASA successfully completed in 2010.

Years later, NASA launched its Ascent Abort-2 test atop a modified missile in preparation for the Artemis launches. For that, the Armstrong team had a more focused role designing and testing the network of hundreds of sensors that would be the agency's eyes and ears for the test. This included strapping the sensors to a vibration table and giving them a solid shake to make sure they could handle the G-forces.

"If the tree falls in the forest, and no one was around to hear, did it actually make a sound?" said Laurie Grindle, Armstrong deputy center director who served as the project manager for the first abort test. "If we didn't have any instrumentation, we could have launched something great that showed up wonderful on video, but we wouldn't know if it performed well."

The second test went off without a hitch in 2019. The teams got invaluable data — and some wonderful video too.

In 2022, NASA's uncrewed Artemis I test mission with the abort system successfully reach the moon — no abort needed. When the crewed Artemis II mission launches to the moon as soon as tomorrow, the abort system will, for the first time, be responsible for keeping astronauts alive.