Everyday Astronaut
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2020–2023
55:46 · 1.3M views · Mar 20, 2020
Everyday Astronaut's Tim Dodd runs an hour-long, data-driven analysis of what rockets actually emit and how that compares with airliners and other industries. It breaks down exhaust by propellant type, per-passenger and total emissions, and ways launches could be cleaner.
HN commenters cite it whenever rocket launch pollution comes up as a rebuttal to alarm, since it shows launches are small next to other sources.
9 comments from Hacker News
Everyday Astronaut did an hour long video on "How Much Do Rockets Pollute? Are They Bad For Our Air?": this video I highly recommend to everyone who is concerned about this. The knee-jerk reaction needs to be toned down a little bit, we need to look at the data first.
Great question and I suspect you are correct regarding the impact being small (Tim Dodd the everyday astronaut, made a great youtube video about rocket launch pollution, check that out for sure this video ). He concluded that even with increased launch rates, the pollution remains small compared to other industries such as the airline industry. Not the same thing, but I'd argue the impact from satellites and debris burning up is less than the rocket it took to get up there in the first place. All that being said, we at Turion Space don't want to build a sustainable future in space at the cost of polluting Earth. For the first missions, we will drag the debris down to burn up in Earth's atmosphere, but long term, we plan to utilize reusable launch vehicle upper stages (think Starship, Relativity, and others) to bring stuff back down for us. It's a bit of an essay for a simple question, but regardless of how polluting it may be, with fully reusable launch vehicles coming online in the same time frame we are looking at performing missions, we will use those to bring stuff back down.
At 37:00 of the video below, Tim Dodd concludes that SpaceX's Starship will emit 1.79 metric tons of CO2 per passenger, while a 737 will emit .33 tons. SpaceX wants to generate Starship's methane from the atmosphere, so it could be zero I found Tim's video to be more informative than the Conversation article this video
Great video here about this: this video The summary is that yes they pollute a lot for what they are, but compared to almost any other major polluting industry (travel, freight, construction, etc) it's barely anything and won't be much of a problem for a long time.
Everyday Astronaut on YouTube has a great video on the environmental impact of rockets. 55 minutes long but it's fascinating. The TL;DW is they're not as bad as you'd expect. But not zero-emissions, obviously. this video