Climate Change. Pixabay.

by Frank Martin

Those who are interested in promoting space tourism will have to face an additional obstacle: The one raised by the defenders of nature in their protests.

The reason is that the modality has been revealed as “a major risk for the Earth climate”, at least in its current technical conditions.

The discovery that has placed the impressive trips outside the earth’s atmosphere in the ecological pillory is that the rockets used until now by their boosters emit black carbon.

This breaks the indicators of controllable contamination of those devices that billionaires Elon Musk and Richard Branson used to climb beyond the stratosphere.

In the stratospheric ozone, natural conditions are 500 times worse than climatic conditions on earth.

The problem has increased competition among companies seeking conquer outer space for tourism. Even a successful businessman appeared, billionaire Jeff Bezos, whose rockets burn liquid hydrogen and oxygen and thus pose less of a climate threat.

A recent scientific study indicates that this convulsive world already plagued by strong polluting gases must reduce and not increase short-lived climate pollutants such as carbon dioxide in order to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement.

The complaints of environmentalists are already heard everywhere. They consider more than enough coal mining that emits more polluting methane and the burning of gas and oil wells that pollute the atmosphere.

Several prominent scientists say that the space tourism industry, if it develops as expected, could promote significant global warming and thus deplete the protective ozone layer.

Without that protection, life on earth would have, they say, the days numbered. Black carbon, which comes from burning fossil fuels or biomass, absorbs sunlight and releases heat energy, making it a powerful climate warming agent. At lower altitudes, black carbon falls rapidly from the sky and remains in the atmosphere for only a few days or weeks.

When rockets are fired into space, they emit black carbon into the stratosphere where it remains, absorbing sunlight and radiating heat, for up to four years before falling back to Earth.

And it is not just carbon black according to the reviews made public by many laboratories and specialized magazines.

In 2021, the space jumps of the Branson and Bezos firms were inaugurated. So Blue Origin, Bezos’s company, used liquid hydrogen and oxygen for its rocket, described as much less polluting.

But Virgin Group, created by Branson, powered its project with a mixture of solid fuel called HTPB and nitrous oxide, which produces large amounts of CO2.

Both programs released water vapor in the different middle layers of the atmosphere, which could act as a greenhouse gas.

Emissions contribute to the increase in the Earth’s temperature, since they allow heat to stagnate in the atmosphere and damage the ozone layer.

There are alarming comparative data: an average passenger on a conventional flight can generate emissions of between half a ton and three tons of CO2, while one of the space flights can produce between 50 and 75 tons of CO2 emitted in minutes.

“A large increase in the number of space launches, which is expected by the space tourism industry, poses a risk to the climate by adding black carbon particles to the upper atmosphere, and as a result we need to think very carefully about how to regulate this. before it spirals out of control,” said Robert Ryan, a researcher at University College London and lead author of the climate study on space pollution.

“It would be a real shame for humanity to look back in  50 or 100 years into the future with thousands of rocket  launches yearly and think: ‘If only we had done something,'”  the specialist commented.

FM