Unnecessary pollution? This Thursday, Blue Origin launched its sixth space tourism mission. A flight observed by many fans, but also highly criticized for the pollution it generates. Many fear that the emissions associated with this nascent industry are too high.
In reality, it is very difficult to know for sure the ecological cost of a flight, since the data is kept secret by the companies involved. Blue Origin has also tried to defend against this.
“The New Shepard rocket engine runs on clean liquid oxygen and hydrogen. During flight, combustion produces only water vapor with no carbon emissions,” a spokesman told Reuters magazine. Weather.
Just as you remember Weather, water vapor is a greenhouse gas. According to NASA, it is even the largest on Earth, responsible for more than half of the greenhouse effects that the planet suffers.
Does SpaceX avoid the problem?
As for Virgin Galactic, the data has been made public thanks to a survey by the US Federal Aviation Administration dating from 2012. In this text, the US agency reveals that SpaceShipTwo flights emit 27.17 tons of CO2, which which corresponds to almost 140,000 km by car according to the ADEME CO2 Converter.
Little information circulates about the ecological weight of SpaceX. However, to avoid criticism, Elon Musk assured last December that he intended to recover the CO2 present in the atmosphere to transform it into fuel for his rockets.
However, CO2 and water vapor may not be the most serious contamination in space tourism. In fact, spaceflight produces a lot of soot according to a study published in the future of earth in June. And the fact that it produces much less than conventional air traffic does not reduce the problem based on the height at which this fine particle is rejected.
Soot “injected directly into the upper atmosphere” with rockets has a climate change impact “500 times greater than all other sources of soot,” such as airplanes, the study authors write.
Concerns are likely to grow over time as space tourism companies plan to exponentially increase the number of flights. In 2021, Virgin Galactic said it wanted to reach 3 tourist flights per month by 2023, a rate that rival carriers could follow.
Source: BFM TV
