“We keep talking about farming and aviation, but what about all those space rockets that are being launched? Aren’t they bad for the environment?” Robin Bruins rightly wonders that.
The first Russian rockets that lifted the satellite Sputnik 1 and later the manned Vostok from the Baikonur cosmodrome in the 1960s used UDMH (1,1-dimethylhydrazine) fuel. Nice stuff from a thrust point of view: lots of power, stable, and shock resistant. But also carcinogenic and so toxic that the area around the Cosmodrome was heavily polluted for decades. It was not for nothing that it was nicknamed the ‘devil’s poison’ by Russian scientists.
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Other air layers
A lot has changed since then and because rockets aren’t fired that much into a vacuum, the consequences for the environment remained under the radar for a long time. But partly thanks to the Musks, Bransons and Bezos of this world, the number of launches has more than doubled within a few years: from 70 to about 140. That number is expected to increase tenfold in the next ten to twenty years. This suddenly makes it important for ‘science’ to look at this more emphatically.
At present, the percentage of fossil fuels burned by the space industry is only 1 percent of that consumed by conventional aviation. There are people who claim that the pollution from space travel is not too bad, but Eloise Marais, associate professor of physical geography at University College London, sees it differently. In an interview with the BBC, she says: “If we compare the amount emitted from rocket launches to that from aircraft, it doesn’t sound like a lot. But this equation has always been wrong because airplanes emit their pollutants into the troposphere and lower stratosphere, while rockets emit their pollutants all the way from the Earth’s surface to the mesosphere.” And pollution in those upper layers lingers much longer than that in lower parts of the atmosphere.
Doubling carbon emissions
Marais and her team calculated that if all planned tourist space trips go ahead, carbon emissions will more than double in three years. And that particles ejected from rockets trap nearly five hundred times more heat in the atmosphere than all other sources of soot combined. So unless we suddenly all go to space together, it seems sensible to invest heavily in cleaner fuels.
You can find this question in WATCH 9/2022.
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Image: NASA
