Outraged by the dying light in this new video.
NASA’s Orion spacecraft’s cockpit glows pink from the glow of the Launch Cancellation System (LAS) tower, which is beaming away from the Space Launch System (SLS) stack of rockets and spacecraft. This all happened as planned during the epic launch of the Artemis 1 mission to the Moon on November 16th.
The movie-like moment, which looks like a scene from “Interstellar” or “Star Wars,” LAS flies away from the cockpit within sight of an astronaut mannequin that tests for radiation and other space hazards before humans get on board.
Lockheed Martin, which built the Orion spacecraft, shared the cockpit view on Twitter (Opens in a new tab) on Friday (December 1), in anticipation of what astronauts will see with their own eyes starting with the Artemis 2 projected trip around the moon in 2024. The lunar landing mission Artemis 3 will follow as soon as 2025, with more Artemis Program missions in the works.
Pictures: Artemis 1 launch: Spectacular debut views on a NASA moon rocket
The SLS Launch Abort System generates enough thrust to lift 26 elephants off the ground, according to a NASA tally. (Opens in a new tab). That’s more power than what’s available to five F-22s.
NASA’s version of ‘Force’ is to pull astronauts away from the SLS rocket quickly and safely in the event of an emergency. If the launch results in the crew getting into space without incident, the LAS tower will slosh away into space to reduce the mass of the capsule before its journey to the moon.
Epic video from all over Artemis 1 kept audiences riding with the spacecraft around the Moon and toward Earth again, providing stunningly vivid views of the Moon’s surface and our distant planet that left NASA engineers “giddy” with joy.
Orion is expected to lift off on December 11th, following in the footsteps of generations of missions featuring their abort systems.
Related: The 25 Scariest Spaceflight Moments show dangers in orbit and beyond
Most space systems with humans on board have been equipped with ejection seats or abort towers through manned history, with the exception of recent space shuttle missions which instead had options to cancel the mission with the crew still inside the craft.
Perhaps the most dramatic use of a virtual abort using a launch escape tower was the Soviet Union’s Soyuz T-10-1 launch on September 26, 1983. Russian space journalist Anatoly Zak says the system saved the launch crew’s lives because it pulled them away. (Opens in a new tab) From an exploding missile still on the launch pad.
The most recent crewed abort on October 11, 2018 during the Soyuz mission, the MS-10 to the International Space Station did not use the escape tower, as it had already been jettisoned, but the crew used the alternate abort mode to return to Earth quickly and safely. (You can listen to the frustration as it happened in the video above.)
Private space providers have their own escape systems on their rockets, as demonstrated during the dramatic uncrewed Blue Origin launch failure of Shepard’s new escape system on September 12, 2022. The emergency escape system safely retracted the capsule from the booster, which was presumably destroyed, during launch. Blue Origin is investigating the cause and plans to launch people into space again no later than 2023, after making six manned missions without incident.
Elizabeth Howell is co-author of “Why am I taller (Opens in a new tab)? (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book on space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @tweet (Opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @employee (Opens in a new tab) or Facebook (Opens in a new tab).