Ask HN: How destructive to the environment are these “space tourism” trips? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How destructive to the environment are these “space tourism” trips?

3 pointswinternett12 comments

I'm not against valid space trips, but in the past years we've launched a lot of things into space...

Watching today's launch of Captain Kirk, I was thinking hard about the potential waste of resources, potential environmental damage, and money that are evident in these new space tourism programs, as well as in other ones that have been done to date by other companies?

These are well funded projects, because of the consumer products that these companies sell. But it's also disheartening that these companies are very vocal about a stance in environmental protection while they stand to burn tons of rocket fuel and create a space tourism industry that will certainly not help environmental protection efforts.

It's hard for me to believe that all the burnt rocket fuel and heat generation and that sending rockets into the atmosphere will not amplify our path towards peril. It would make a lot more sense if we just gave all the funding and authorization back to NASA and accountable scientists if you ask me. It also bewilders me that government would allow this level of pollution for vanity purposes, including launching a car into space for no reason (a few years ago) when we've already got a growing "space junk" problem brewing too.

How destructive to the environment are these "space tourism" trips?

The development of space resources is the ONLY potential avenue of technological development that will lead to an abundance of material wealth while decreasing our impact on the environment. A handful of joyrides now is peanuts by comparison.

What about replicators?

I assume you mean atomically precise manufacturing? That has the potential to bring us into an age of radical abundance mainly by substituting the materials used in high technology from rare metallic elements to carbon-based diamond. Where diamond based meta materials are sufficient, we can free up our use of metals. But for those cases where rare crustal elements are still needed, and fir energy generation, access to space will be required in the long run.

But yes I agree, and that’s why my two slow burn start ups have been related to astroid mining and molecular nanotechnology.

LOX/RP1 is pretty awful for the environment - space-flight is by no-means eco-friendly (I suppose apart from the Space-shuttle main-engines)

Notably SoaceX doesn’t use RP1 for Starship, and is aiming for a carbon neutral fuel source.

New Shepard uses hydrogen + oxygen which could be produced without CO2 emissions.

It's relatively straightforward to synthesize methane (Starship fuel) from a stream of carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

In the past people got the carbon monoxide from pyrolysis of coal

https://netl.doe.gov/research/Coal/energy-systems/gasificati...

but today people are doing it with carbon dioxide extracted from the air or from another combustion process.

You could make RP1, Jet Fuels, and other hydrocarbons this way too

https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/coal/energy-systems/gasifi...

but the chemistry is tricky because the reactions that break chains down to methane or build them up to polyethylene will run quickly except when conditions are balanced on a knife edge... One where the reaction rates aren't too high and amount of product you get for the size of the machine is not good.

The emissions aren't the only issue in question though, the vast amounts of heat generated during each launch contributes to mounting environmental problems as well, right?

No. It doesn’t release any more heat than burning that fuel in cars or airplanes would. Chemistry is chemistry. And a Falcon 9 consumes about as much fuel as 3 fully loaded 737s. While not trivial, it’s also negligible in the grand scheme of things. We could be launching hundreds of these every day before it has a noticeable impact on the global environment.

>3 fully loaded 737s

3 fully loaded 747s carry a lot more passengers than Falcon 9 does on one launch, and for a much more effective and better reason than just outer-atmosphere space tourism...

The primary ideal of space tourism is simply entertainment. It's a roller coaster ride of sorts. Especially if the launches grow in popularity, the impact will be far worse. It's is not sound logic to say it's harmless.

The 737 can take 150 people across the United States, let’s attribute that to one Dragon passenger; that is 150 flights, which is a lot, but some ‘frequent fliers’ do two or more flights a week.

Such a person could easily burn an orbital flight full of fuel in less than two years.

I did some napkin math before on the CO2. A falcon 9 launch is about 400 Transatlantic flights. There are roughly 40000 of those per day and a little over 100 F9 launches.

So by that rough math, all falcon 9 ever is about 1 day of flights across the Atlantic. Still far below all flights in a single day.

The joy rides are less harmful because they don't use as much energy and thus fuel

The purpose of those plane trips are evident and often mission critical.

The outer-atmosphere trips are not mission critical. We have also established the ability to launch rockets into outer space, so I doubt that research could be a reasonable justification for the damage?

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