The rocket launches actually caused the land to sink, ask Hank Johnson.
Via CNN:
NASA’s rockets are astounding machines, capable of blasting into space at thousands of miles per hour and withstanding temperatures twice the melting point of steel.
But they can’t take off underwater.
Rising sea levels caused by melting ice caps threaten to disrupt a handful of NASA launch sites along U.S. coastlines, the space agency warns. In the coming years, launch facilities at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center and other places may need to be retrofitted or even moved inland, NASA says.
“Every NASA center has its own set of vulnerabilities, and some are more at risk than others,” NASA climatologist Cynthia Rosenzweig said in a recent post on one of the agency’s websites. “But sea level rise is a very real challenge for all of the centers along the coast.”
In other words, NASA has a lot of people and property potentially in harm’s way, especially in a big coastal storm.
NASA says that more than half of its infrastructure stands within 16 feet of sea level. That includes more than $32 billion in laboratories, launch pads, airfields, testing facilities, data centers and other stuff — plus 60,000 employees — from Florida to California.
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.