As top tycoons blast off, space tourism sparks new concerns
WASHINGTON: After years of waiting, Richard Branson’s journey to space this month on a Virgin Galactic vessel was supposed to be a triumphant homecoming. Instead, the jaunt attracted significant criticism - about its carbon footprint.
With Jeff Bezos set to launch on a Blue Origin rocket on July 20, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX planning an all-civilian orbital mission in September, the nascent space tourism industry finds itself facing questions about its environmental impact.
Right now, rocket launches as a whole don’t happen often enough to pollute significantly.
“The carbon dioxide emissions are totally negligible compared to other human activities or even commercial aviation,” Nasa’s chief climate adviser Gavin Schmidt told AFP.
But some scientists are worried about the potential for longer term harm as the industry is poised for major growth, particularly impacts to the ozone layer in the still poorly understood upper atmosphere.
Virgin Galactic says its carbon emissions are about equivalent to a business-class ticket from London to New York.
But while transatlantic flights carry hundreds of people, Virgin’s emissions work out to around 4.5 tonnes per passenger in a six passenger flight, according to an analysis published by French astrophysicist Roland Lehoucq and colleagues in The Conversation.
That’s equivalent to driving a typical car around the Earth.
“The issue here is really one of disproportionate impacts,” Darin Toohey, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder told AFP.
Compared to Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo spaceplanes, Blue Origin’s are much cleaner, according to a recent paper by scientist Martin Ross of Aerospace, which Bezos’ company plugged on Twitter. That’s because it burns liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, which combusts as water vapour. But that doesn’t mean it’s totally clean. “It takes electricity to make liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen,” Ross told AFP.