Published today in the journal Earth's Future, researchers from UCL, the University of Cambridge and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used a 3D model to explore the impact of rocket launches and re-entry in 2019, and the impact of projected space tourism scenarios based on the recent billionaire space race.
The team found that black carbon (soot) particles emitted by rockets are almost 500 times more efficient at holding heat in the atmosphere than all other sources of soot combined (surface and aircraft) – resulting in an enhanced climate effect.
Furthermore, while the study revealed that the current loss of total ozone due to rockets is small, current growth trends around space tourism indicate potential for future depletion of the upper stratospheric ozone layer in the Arctic in spring. This is because pollutants from solid-fuel rockets and re-entry heating of returning spacecraft and debris are particularly harmful to stratospheric ozone.
Study co-author Dr Eloise Marais (UCL Geography) said: "Rocket launches are routinely compared to greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions from the aircraft industry, which we demonstrate in our work is erroneous.
Journal Reference:
Robert G. Ryan, Eloise A. Marais, Chloe J. Balhatchet, and Sebastian D. Eastham, Impact of Rocket Launch and Space Debris Air Pollutant Emissions on Stratospheric Ozone and Global Climate [open], Earth's Future, 10, 6, 2022. DOI: 10.1029/2021EF002612
(Score: 5, Informative) by oumuamua on Sunday July 03 2022, @05:52PM (2 children)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/world/europe/germany-russia-gas.html [nytimes.com]
This decision far outstrips the CO2 produced from rockets, even in the everyday launch scenario.
They were forced to do it you say? Well they could have chosen the green option of restarting the nuclear plants they closed down less than 6 months ago, just before the war.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/correction-germany-nuclear-shutdown-story-82051054 [go.com]
Furthermore, they are still planning to close their remaining nuclear plants:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/could-germany-keep-its-nuclear-plants-running-2022-06-22/ [reuters.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @07:08PM
The todays "green religion" is not about nature, it is about corruption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04 2022, @10:46AM
Not the green party. Their motto is more like "anything with word nuclear is evil". It's actually why NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) had to be renamed to MRI (magnetic resonance imaging)... NMR is actually the real name of the process but because of the word "nuclear", people had to freak out. And you know, there is actually no radiation involved but you know. "Bone Scan"? No problem, even when you get to drink highly radioactive nuclear material :-)
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @06:17PM (4 children)
Only rich people can afford space tourism and anything rich people do is OK. A workable solution will be to double the carbon tax on everyone else.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @07:14PM
You forgot to log in, Al Gore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @09:13PM (1 child)
That is how it's going to go.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Monday July 04 2022, @01:53AM
After a few dozen conferences concern trolling folks invested in selling carbon credits fly their private gulfstreams to...
(Score: 2) by bmimatt on Wednesday July 06 2022, @03:42PM
Or just tax it appropriately high to offset whatever damages space travel creates. The wealthy who get to take those trips can afford it. If you're concerned with making it costly on international competition level, ask yourself this: what do we make here that is less expensive than in the rest of the world? The only thing that comes to my mind is large chain 'burgers'.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @07:17PM (34 children)
Atmospheric dust is demonstrated, time and again, to hold heat OUT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter [wikipedia.org]
Soot from our cities' burning is promised to do the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter [wikipedia.org]
Now, is the rockets' soot magic - or are some pretend scientists completely without shame, and take us all for dupes with no brains and no memories?
Given the quality of greenie discourse we observe here and elsewhere, I am 100% sure it is the latter.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Opportunist on Sunday July 03 2022, @07:48PM (9 children)
I dunno if you ever spent more than a passing moment in a city during Winter, but even in cities with little pollution, the heat is unbearable during Summer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @08:55PM (8 children)
Two words: stone desert.
Here in Rīga, where our city hall forbids putting a skyscraper over every patch of green, we have a lot of grass and trees, a lot of parks (and some forests), and NO "unbearable heat" in summer. Fancy that. ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @09:53PM
In all fairness, you are living close to the North pole.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Monday July 04 2022, @03:01AM (4 children)
I sure notice that in my yard. I have trees and am very reticent to trim them. It's quite noticeably cooler under those trees. My belief three things are in play simultaneously:
1) Shade.
2) Evaporative cooling from the leaves.
3) Photosynthesis to be an endothermic reaction
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=is%20photosynthesis%20endothermic%3F [duckduckgo.com]
to store photonic energy and CO2 into carbohydrates ( leaves, branches, trunks, flowers, etc. ), Which is released to whatever eats or burns the carbohydrate structures the plant assembled.
I try to encourage others to work with nature instead of jumping into the rat race of expending even more resources to do the same thing but with considerable external cost.
What in the hell do people see in "neatly manicured lawns" anyway. Is it some sort of demonstration that one has resources to waste? Just leave it alone and Nature will plan it for you. Of course, you are always free to rearrange the placement to your liking. My favorite plants and trees found me. And a few neighbors helped by sharing their prunings with me.
I'll readily share too. Just for the asking. I have some rootone...I'll even start 'em off for you.
I do not have a blade of grass. This is Southern California. Was a desert. Not grassland. The grass is lush only if I bring lots of water to it, but my ash trees seem to love it here. So do my eucalyptus.
I have many more plants and vines, and I don't know what they are. But they are green and pretty. That's good enough for me. And the more I get, the more they thrive.
Oh yes, they love oga!
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=22/06/22/0451216 [soylentnews.org]
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04 2022, @07:16AM (1 child)
> What in the hell do people see in "neatly manicured lawns" anyway.
I've read that the original intent of a lawn was to make a buffer zone between the critters in the woods/wildlands and the rural house. Clearly it's gone far beyond that in many areas.....
The guy that bought the former hoarder house across the street and gutted it (to be fixed up as a rental) hasn't been mowing the lawn and the weeds are several feet high. If he's not careful the woodchucks/groundhogs, skunks and other friends will be moving into his house soon, I've seen them over there already.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday July 05 2022, @12:07AM
Yeh, I get weeds too. I do insist that my land is walkable. Carpet of leaves. To provide an evaporative barrier to the soil below. If the sunlight hits raw soil, the surface moisture evaporates then the young plants can't get any. Most of my plants are like an overhead canopy. I clear away ground level thickets. But I will use foliage to construct wall- like structures by foliation patterns af various plants and where I will plant them.
I just try to use whatever is given to me, as I see fit.
Just because I can be wasteful doesn't mean I should.
There is one weed in particular I hate...it's that one that makes all those sharp pointy seeds that get all tangled up in my cats. And dandelions. They make too much work for me. Mice, no problem, cat toys.
My cats bring me the ones they broke, and I return them to the circle of life by giving them to my plants.
I believe we have plenty of resources, if we can only use what we have wisely. My observation (suburban USA) is we are extremely wasteful of what we have, and our garbage bins are full of evidence to verify my claim.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday July 04 2022, @09:51PM
>What in the hell do people see in "neatly manicured lawns" anyway. Is it some sort of demonstration that one has resources to waste?
Exactly.
Lawns were originally the exclusive domain of the aristocracy, where they served to demonstrate how much manpower and arable land they could afford to dedicate to a completely useless manicured lawn, kept to short to even provide grazing.
As the middle class gained wealth, and no longer depended as heavily on their home gardens/farms, they began mimicking the aristocrats' wasteful displays to one-up their neighbors.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 05 2022, @01:05AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday July 04 2022, @08:37AM (1 child)
Being at roughly the same latitude as Canada and Alaska certainly also helps cooling the city center down.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 05 2022, @01:15AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @08:08PM (10 children)
Atmospheric dust and soot in general does have that affect. But they are not talking about volcanic ash or ash from firestorms. They are talking specifically about the composition of rocket exhaust, which is different from your other cited sources, and the fact the black carbon is injected straight into the upper atmosphere. So instead of magic soot or lying scientists, this sounds more like a "you problem." Specifically your un-/mis- informed idea of pollution sources.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @09:02PM (4 children)
What, exactly, made you believe volcanic dust is not "injected straight into the upper atmosphere"?
https://www.almanac.com/year-without-summer-mount-tambora-volcanic-eruption [almanac.com]
While I cannot care less how "this sounds" to a Mr. Random Greenie Ignoramus, your being misinformed is a "YOU problem". Deal with it, or don't.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @10:23PM (3 children)
In case you didn't know, Volcanoes are on the ground. Meaning that all the pollution from them has to travel through the lower layers to have any chance of reaching the upper atmosphere. Rockets actually travel through the upper atmosphere meaning that the exhaust expelled while doing so ends up directly in the upper atmosphere.
(Score: -1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @11:39PM (2 children)
Why is it that every silly greenie has plenty of time to spout ignorant bullshit, but never time to look things up, even on the damn Wikipedia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruption_plume#Column_heights [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04 2022, @05:56AM (1 child)
Why does it that every silly anti-greenie has plenty of time to spout ignorant bullshit, but never time to look things up, even on the damn dictionary?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/directly [merriam-webster.com]
Why is it that every silly anti-greenie has plenty of time to spout ignorant bullshit, but never time to look things up, even on the damn Wikipedia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_atmosphere [wikipedia.org]
Why is it that every silly anti-greenie has plenty of time to spout ignorant bullshit, but never time to look things up, even on the damn Wikipedia they already cited?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruption_plume#Column_heights [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 04 2022, @10:24PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday July 03 2022, @11:34PM (4 children)
Is that difference relevant though? I have yet to see explained why absorption from surface radiation is more than absorption from incoming solar radiation. And there's this:
Equal parts kerosene, hypergolic, and cryogenic fuels, none which contain aluminum - 0% percent solid rocket propellant. So how do we get 28% due to Al2O3?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04 2022, @06:17AM (3 children)
If you really wanted to know where that number comes from, you could have just read the source, [wiley.com] which you were kind enough to include in your quote. Instead of asking a bunch of randos on the Internet.
BTW, there are hypergolic fuels with aluminium in them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 04 2022, @12:56PM (2 children)
Fine, when I do, I find that the authors use an untested radiative model, which among other things uses a primitive model of scattering and absorption (see Section 3). A key problem with that is that while they might be able to get an order of magnitude bound, they can't similarly get the sign of the forcing. Further, no special properties of rocket exhaust black carbon were ever mentioned, indicating to me that they were relying on just on its effects at a given altitude.
And this is at odds with nuclear winter studies which also have stratospheric black carbon. For example [rutgers.edu]:
Other aspects like the loitering time of these particles in atmosphere seem more consistent with four years for rocket exhaust as the approximation in the first cited study and a seven year nuclear winter in the second.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04 2022, @02:46PM (1 child)
I'm not convinced about the "untested radiative model" because I don't have access to the paper [copernicus.org] where it is described. I do note that this paper assumes a black soot particulate size that is five times smaller than the Ph.D. dissertation you provided, and the dissertation also assumes the soot aggregates and grows in size. The dissertation work also assumes 150 Tg of material is put into the upper atmosphere at around 9 to 13 km (if I did the pressure conversion correct), while this paper distributes the particulates where they are expelled all the way up to the 80 km limit of the model. There's way too many apples-to-oranges going on here that I don't think you can compare the two works, particularly at the level where you'd claim one refutes the other.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 04 2022, @10:25PM
And that's relevant why?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @09:36PM (5 children)
What's cool about Open Access articles is that you can actually go and read them before sounding off with irrelevant facts. The amazing thing about chemistry is that different things behave differently and not all soot is made from the same thing. I know, ROCKET SCIENCE!
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @10:19PM (4 children)
I know, magic computer simulations predicting future doom cannot be wrong, ever! Especially after their consistently being wrong for three decades flat. Faith is faith is faith.
Scientists that should be shooting such those canards down at the peer review phase, sold their souls for grants, and "forgot" that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Now the reputation of science as an institution is in the gutter because of them, while the very money they took in exchange for that damage, is now set to become chaff. All that shit, for nothing in the end.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04 2022, @04:23AM (3 children)
We don't need no stinking computers. We have our gut feelings. That served us well for hundreds of years. Volcanoes clearly spew phlogiston, which interacts with everything including the upper atmosphere, and it is well known amongst educated men that rockets spew phlogiston too.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04 2022, @10:19AM (2 children)
What we need is EXPERIMENTAL PROOF. You know, that near-forgotten thing that science was all about since forever? "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."
When you program things into a computer and run the program, you do NOT get new knowledge. What you get, is some implications from your assumptions at best, or some garbage from your errors at worst. Science is testing your calculations against the reality, and going back to the drawing board if they mismatch; without that essential step, it is a mere numbers game.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04 2022, @03:11PM (1 child)
What constitutes experimental proof to you in this context? The models work in as many physical phenomena they can for radiative transfer, thermal transfer, absorption and emission properties of the chemicals in the atmosphere, etc., etc. And the models used in these research papers aren't fresh out of the box, never been tested either. You seem to think people are slapping together something in a vacuum and blindly spitting out the results and that there is the One True Model. That's not the way this works.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 04 2022, @10:26PM
In other words, you don't have experimental proof. You just have flexibility - which is not a good thing!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @11:34PM (6 children)
From the summary above:
Quite clearly it is magic soot. It is 500 times as efficient as ordinary soot.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @11:45PM (5 children)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, don't they?
"The rocket soot is 500x as efficient as ordinary soot" is quite an extraordinary claim, is it not?
"Because our computer simulation said so" is not even ordinary evidence, don't you agree?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04 2022, @04:34AM (4 children)
It is almost like they need to write a paper [doi.org] or something to explain how they got that number.
Maybe some day.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 04 2022, @04:44AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday July 04 2022, @07:55AM (1 child)
(Score: 1, Redundant) by khallow on Monday July 04 2022, @12:58PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04 2022, @10:21AM
It is almost like you are unable to comprehend what you read.
(Score: 4, Informative) by looorg on Sunday July 03 2022, @08:00PM (4 children)
What space tourism? As far as I know there isn't anyone yet, and certainly wasn't one in 2019. So their model is based on a few megarich people that wanted to fly up and down a bit to claim they are now astronauts?
That said sure space tourism can more or less only increase since it can't really become smaller since it's already more or less non-existing. If they take some megarich people up into space as they are going there anyway does it really increase the climate damage or matter all to much? When are Virgin, SpaceX and Blue starting to ship people into space like the rockets are cattle cars? Not anytime soon as far as I know. But sure, our eyes are wide open for the future space tourism industry (that I doubt will be a thing in my life time).
So are we waiting for "green"-rocketfuel (isn't it already kind of green, just not that kind of green?) or are we waiting for Elon to start an electric rocket company? Or is it the Wile E. Coyote method of rocket launching that will save the environment?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 03 2022, @08:53PM
> What space tourism?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Hughes_(daredevil) [wikipedia.org] mad mike hughes medaling in the darwin awards?
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Sunday July 03 2022, @09:25PM
Only think I know is that RP-1 is occasionally dyed red, but green?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 04 2022, @12:34AM
>the Wile E. Coyote method of rocket launching
You mean this?
https://nypost.com/2022/04/15/giant-space-slingshot-set-to-launch-nasa-craft-in-2022-revealed/ [nypost.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04 2022, @07:23AM
> ...a few megarich people
...a few gigarich people
ftfy -- the goalposts have moved.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Sunday July 03 2022, @09:15PM
The age of men is over. The time of the Orc has come.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 03 2022, @09:24PM (1 child)
It's time for someone to invent the next structural compound beyond carbon fiber. Then we can send elementary school graduating classes to an observation platform, where they can look down on the earth, and decide they want to be astro-nuts.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday July 04 2022, @10:04PM
Sadly space elevators are unlikely to be possible on Earth.
There's solid reasons to believe that carbon nanotubes are approaching the maximum strength-to-weight ratio possible, and a perfect cable of those would be just a bit stronger than needed to support its own weight - it's nowhere near strong enough to provide the factor-of-10 safety margin generally accepted as good engineering practice when human lives are at stake, in order to accommodate the inevitable imperfections and wear over time.
Diamond thread seems to be a bit stronger, but still not enough to provide the necessary safety margins, and it is even more difficult to produce. And there aren't a lot of other candidates. Carbon is the lightest element capable of forming four covalent bonds, and C-C bonds are among the strongest we've found. Pretty much every other element will form fewer and weaker bonds per unit mass.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by corey on Sunday July 03 2022, @10:35PM (1 child)
I can see this becoming a problem in the future so it’s good to think about now.
A solution I see is simple: force operators of the rockets to include that normally externalised cost of environmental impact. So, include in the cost of each flight, the price to offset the emissions. Could be to plant trees or some other measure. I suppose it’s basically including them in the carbon market.
The cost wouldn’t be much compared to the flight base cost, and it wouldn’t matter right now because the passengers are millionaires and billionaires.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 04 2022, @10:31PM
What would that amount be? Too often, externalities are just pulled out of someone's ass - for example, that wonk group [soylentnews.org] in the IMF who routinely claims that there are 5+ trillion USD of fossil fuel subsidies, most which is just imaginary externalities that the group thinks fossil fuel uses should be paying.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Sunday July 03 2022, @11:05PM (2 children)
If soot from rocket engines really is a problem worth worrying about, then it's a good thing that none of the next-generation highly reusable rockets that could make to make space tourism remotely popular are burning fuels that produce soot.
Right now I think it's safe to say that New Shephard is responsible for the majority of space tourism (sure, energetically they never get anywhere close to orbit, but if you get high enough to be hit by something in (very low) orbit, I think it's fair to count it as space), and they burn hydrogen and LOX, so the only exhaust is water vapor (and possibly some nitrogen compounds formed from atmospheric interaction with the exhaust plume)
Meanwhile Starship, and the majority of other next-gen rockets in development, are all using methane (the rest use hydrogen) - chosen in large part because it burns cleanly, producing virtually no soot or tars to gum up in the engines like RP-1 and rubber-based fuels do. and no soot produced = no soot in the exhaust.
In fairness I suppose Virgin Galactic with its rubber-based fuels is a legitimate problem... but unless they can lower their prices by several orders of magnitude once Starship starts taking commercial passengers, they're going to be a flash in the pan. Who's going to pay those kinds of prices if you can get a round-trip pair of half-hour suborbital flights to anywhere in the world for a price comparable to the same trip by airplane, and with fewer CO2 emissions? Heck, you could buy out the whole flight for a private experience for less than the current suborbital flights are costing.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04 2022, @10:55AM (1 child)
Methane, like every other hydrocarbon, produces soot. It's actually one reason why you DO NOT want to have a gas stove in your house. The air quality goes to shit.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0082078475804012 [sciencedirect.com]
As soon as you have some Carbon, you will get soot.
It's not just them. All solid fuels emit a bunch of crap into the upper atmosphere and so does everything using carbon based fuels. But we live in a world where "it's good until we can find something bad about it", so ....
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday July 04 2022, @02:04PM
Sounds like your link was talking about burning a plume of methane gas in atmosphere - which is a VERY different situation than completely burning a premixed combination of liquid oxygen and methane within a high-temperature, high-pressure combustion chamber. The edges of an atmospheric fuel plume flame mix freely with the surrounding (cooling) atmosphere - in fact combustion can't occur until it does. Which allows for many opportunities for even such a clean-burning fuel as methane to escape the heat before burning completely. In a rocket engine there is no mixing with the atmosphere until the fuel has completely combusted and been expanded through the rocket bell into a directed column of exhaust gas at ambient pressure.
Even if some soot is still produced, it's going to be orders of magnitude less than from burning RP-1(aka kerosene/jet fuel) or other long hydrocarbon fuels that are difficult to burn completely.
As for other solid rocket engines - sure. Most of them aren't even heavily carbon based, and release nasty toxins to make soot or look positively benign in comparison.
HOWEVER - they're again legacy technology that's vastly too expensive to ever be used in large scale space tourism.
If you're concerned about the impacts of large scale space tourism - it makes absolutely no sense to discuss technologies that will never be cheap enough to be used for that purpose.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Monday July 04 2022, @01:56AM (3 children)
I've noticed lots of astro-turfing anti-SpaceX concern trolling all over social media. Boeing is used to competing via lobbiest/regulatory attacks on competitors... don't ever change Boeing... (well, Mcdonald Douglas really)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04 2022, @04:37AM (2 children)
Ah, it all makes sense! Big Rocket is behind this!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 05 2022, @09:22PM (1 child)
Big Pork has a rocketry division and they are rightly afraid of the Big Rocket [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 05 2022, @09:26PM
Should have been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Monday July 04 2022, @12:37PM (3 children)
With the utmost respect to the authors, they've missed something very important. Cheap space travel unlocks space tourism in the tech tree, but it also unlocks orbital solar power. The negative climate impact of the former will be vastly outweighed by the positive impact of the latter. Zero emissions, 95% uptime, works in the rain and at night except-for-predictable-eclipses-around-equinoxes orbital solar power.
The bad point I see is the tech is going to cause wars. Countries with economies based on oil and gas resources are going to hurt in the transition. I don't see a way around that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 04 2022, @01:00PM (1 child)
Assuming the negative climate impact is of global warming rather than global cooling. They don't have experimental verification of that, and it runs counter to what I've seen of nuclear winter research.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Monday July 04 2022, @03:49PM
True, it's an assumption. We (earth) have under 100 launches in the books or scheduled this year. I hope to live long enough that we do that in a day. :)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Monday July 04 2022, @10:21PM
>it also unlocks orbital solar power
If only.
It's certainly *one* of the necessary precursors, but it also needs other technologies we're nowhere near possessing.
Ideally - efficient extreme-range power transmission. Geostationary orbit is just under 36,000km from Earth's surface, while our best attempts at wireless power transmission so far have only spanned several dozen km with hideous efficiency losses.
Alternately, shorter range power transmission (still hundreds or thousands of km), plus global cooperation with enough trust to share such vital infrastructure, since solar farms in lower orbits are going to spend most of their time on the far side of the Earth, and without cooperation you'll need an order of magnitude more of them to get the same continuous power. Plus there's limited space and far more debris in lower orbits - with so much large, fragile infrastructure it'd be relatively trivial for a bad actor to trigger a Kessler syndrome scenario, crippling every nation depending on orbital solar power.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04 2022, @12:40PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing#Forcing_due_to_changes_in_atmospheric_gas [wikipedia.org]
So, let's put this in perspective. The CO2 emissions are contributing about 3W/m2. The ones from rockets are what? A round off error in comparison? So why are we worried about it now? Seems like a distraction or maybe a scientific paper meant for scientific community and not general public.