NASA is borrowing from local theme park knowledge to keep its Artemis astronauts safe during moon launches from Florida.
Teams with NASA’s Artemis program — which aims to send astronauts to lunar realms, starting with Artemis 2‘s round-the-moon effort in 2025 — met with representatives from “a central Florida amusement park” recently to discuss braking systems for a rocket escape system.
NASA did not name which park in a press release issued on Friday (Aug. 9), but its launch pad at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) near Orlando is less than an hour’s drive from Walt Disney World Resort.
“We have neighbors 50 miles [80 kilometers] from us in Orlando that are essentially the world experts on magnetic braking systems,” Jesse Berdis, a mobile launcher deputy project manager for NASA’s exploration and ground systems, said in the release. (That’s the approximate distance from KSC to Disney World.)
Related: Watch how NASA’s Artemis astronauts could escape their rocket in an emergency (photos, video)
Roller coasters around the world employ an eddy current braking system, which uses magnets to slow vehicles down on the rides’ twists, turns and falls. NASA, meanwhile, designed a gondola-like escape basket system for astronauts to get away quickly from the Space Launch System, the rocket tasked with launching Artemis missions to the moon, in case of emergency. That system also uses eddy currents.
While NASA only uses its gondolas for contingencies and for training, the agency wanted the opportunity to talk with people who work with these systems regularly, to see what else could be learned.
“The maintenance crews [at the amusement park] were awesome, because they showed us their nightly, monthly and yearly inspections on what they were doing,” Berdis said. “That gave our operations teams a really good foundation and baseline knowledge of what to expect when they maintain and operate this system for the Artemis missions.”
Based on these conversations, NASA will add an acceleration sensor during testing in the egress baskets, to show how fast these vehicles are moving as they slide 375 feet (114 meters) to the ground.
Related: ‘That’s part of space exploration’: Artemis 2 astronauts unfazed by moon mission delays (exclusive)
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