Would love a detailed breakdown from Ars on the impact of these launches on the climate and environment. Thank you!

Everday Astronaut has an excellent article on this: https://everydayastronaut.com/rocket-pollution/

Summary: some exotics suck, but modern rockets are inconsequential at current volumes.

The impact of rocket pollution is mostly symbolic, especially tourist flights. They're seen as the most conspicuous consumption by much of the general public. Why should an average Joe who is struggling to get by sacrifice to combat climate change while billionaires are dumping hundreds of tons of carbon into the air to fly to space?

There are already good answers to that question, but they are nuanced, and the answer could be quite clear. Bezos' rocket already runs on Hydrogen, he should be paying a little extra for green Hydrogen, just for PR reasons. Musk has already committed to using synthetic methane on Starship. Branson doesn't have an easy answer, but he's mostly irrelevant in the symbolism arena. //

Would love a detailed breakdown from Ars on the impact of these launches on the climate and environment. Thank you!

~16.25 billion gallons of jet fuel burned per year.

One Falcon 9 launch, 25,000 gallons of Kerosene in the 1st stage (the 2nd stage is effectively burning it above the atmosphere, so not sure you can count that).

30 launches in 2021. 750,000 gallons of kerosene.

Total around the world launches of Rockets in 2021 was, what? 60 ish? Many smaller rockets. Let's just double that though and say 1.5 million gallons.

That is ~3.33% of all of the jet fuel burned...in one day. For an entire YEAR of launches at the current rate.

Metholox will produce somewhat lower emissions per joule of energy released to launch a rocket.

So basically, you are talking less than 1/10th of 1% of the entire aviation industry. It would be nice if it was zero emissions. Also of note, SpaceX is looking to do carbon capture and generate methane for launch at some point (though not soon, they will be using in situ wells at their launch facility for the methane).

Until such a point as rocket launching maybe approaches >1% of aviation emissions I think we can safely consider it a rounding error.

edit actually the above should be less than 1/100th of 1%. //

Would love a detailed breakdown from Ars on the impact of these launches on the climate and environment. Thank you!

A very large percentage of the information about those hurricanes comes from satellites. So there’s a pretty big impact from rocket launches.