Billionaires Are Racing to Space —and the Climate is Paying the Price

There’s a spectator sport quality to the billionaire space race. Pick your favorite rich guy and your favorite rocket—Elon Musk’s Falcon 9, Richard Branson’s VSS Unity, Jeff Bezos’s New Shepard—and start your own cheering section. And while it’s not always easy to root for the fabulously rich to get even more fabulous, there’s something in the space race for all of us. Space tourism, after all, is becoming a growth industry, and as the frequency of flights goes up and the cost comes down, we can all dream of earning our astronaut wings. But according to a new study published this month in the journal Earth’s Future, all the new joyriding could come at a steep environmental price. The more rockets that get launched, the more black soot gets injected into the upper atmosphere, not to mention pollutants including nitrogen oxides, aluminum oxide, hydrochloric acid, and chlorine, as well as water vapor. Together, all of that output not only contributes to global warming but also to the depletion of the ozone layer. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] There’s been limited information on the emissions impact of space travel, the study notes. And the sector is largely absent from international climate treaties. The new paper, therefore, “allows us to enter the new era of space tourism with our eyes wide open to the potential impacts,” said co-author Robert Ryan, a research fellow at the University Colle...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change Climate Is Everything healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news