3x as powerful also means, 3 times the emissions from 3x fuel consumption. Meanwhile, car drivers are bullied into saving fuel and emissions because, uh, the environment.
Rocket launches aren’t a significant part of humanity’s carbon footprint, and there’s not much risk of that changing even with a growing space industry.
Electricity generation and transportation, including aviation and shipping, represents 50% of global human emissions. Spaceflight is less than 0.5%.
Let’s pick our battles. We can build rockets and reduce our carbon footprint at the same time. More importantly, if we’re going to point fingers at carbon emitters, let’s actually focus on the industries actually doing significant harm.
If you find a way to launch rockets without chemical propulsion, please share it with the world. Until then, I’m going to be happy to hear we continue to make strides into the final frontier.
There are some interesting efforts in this direction. Not “without” propellants but with much less. There’s Spinlaunch, the company developing a kind of catapult that gets small rockets high into the atmosphere. And there are efforts to launch smaller rockets from the wings of high altitude planes.
We should not be “happy” with the current state of things. Anyone who’s played Kerbal Space Program knows what a lousy deal it is launching chemical rockets off the ground. A tiny bit more payload and you need more fuel, more fuel adds more weight and you need more more fuel…
Rocketry is currently a tiny proportion of emissions so I’m not worried about it. But neither am I complacent about current technology.
3x as powerful also means, 3 times the emissions from 3x fuel consumption. Meanwhile, car drivers are bullied into saving fuel and emissions because, uh, the environment.
Rocket launches aren’t a significant part of humanity’s carbon footprint, and there’s not much risk of that changing even with a growing space industry.
Electricity generation and transportation, including aviation and shipping, represents 50% of global human emissions. Spaceflight is less than 0.5%.
Let’s pick our battles. We can build rockets and reduce our carbon footprint at the same time. More importantly, if we’re going to point fingers at carbon emitters, let’s actually focus on the industries actually doing significant harm.
If you find a way to launch rockets without chemical propulsion, please share it with the world. Until then, I’m going to be happy to hear we continue to make strides into the final frontier.
There are some interesting efforts in this direction. Not “without” propellants but with much less. There’s Spinlaunch, the company developing a kind of catapult that gets small rockets high into the atmosphere. And there are efforts to launch smaller rockets from the wings of high altitude planes.
We should not be “happy” with the current state of things. Anyone who’s played Kerbal Space Program knows what a lousy deal it is launching chemical rockets off the ground. A tiny bit more payload and you need more fuel, more fuel adds more weight and you need more more fuel…
Rocketry is currently a tiny proportion of emissions so I’m not worried about it. But neither am I complacent about current technology.