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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

The next few years are going to be interesting. Assuming it all goes according to plan, this along with BFR/BFS will signal an end to the scrappy duct tape stage of SpaceX’s existence.

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Is there any concern regarding the damage these frequent and big rocket launches are doing to the upper atmosphere? Are people aware of such a thing? Because I have seen very few discussion around the same....

I am also curious about this. Can you imagine trying to curb launches by private companies? Not going to happen especially in today's politics dominated by libertarian populism

It'd be easy, actually. Getting a launch permit requires mountains of paperwork.

In the US, but there are plenty of countries near the equater that would be happy to take the business. Export controls would make it tough for SpaceX, but if there wasn’t another way to launch the demand would lead to foreign companies taking the lead.

tl;dr it won’t happen

It's a matter of scale. There's about two launches per week /globally/. But for a single airport, you might have a flight every two minutes.

There is some concern from solid rocket motors, whose exhaust is absolutely terrible environmentally (big clouds of toxic smoke that erode launch infrastructure, etc). Luckily, SpaceX doesn't use any of those.

I am not sure. Why are you mentioning flights? I am talking about this [1] and [2]. It does not have anything to do with regular planes..

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/spacex-launch-last-y...

[2] https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/25/spacex-rocket-carved-gia...

He's trying to say that rockets emit CO₂, but there are very few of them compared to other things that also emit CO₂ at high altitudes, namely airplanes. He's also saying that some rockets have significant other pollution problems, but not SpaceX's.

Indeed. And there may come a time when such emissions are enough to matter, but we should then just apply a proper tax to them (as well as airplanes). That’d encourage using alternatives (like hydrogen which is actually a superior rocket fuel from an exhaust velocity perspective but is harder to handle and leads to greater dry mass) and also provide incentive to pull such emissions from the atmosphere. Elon Musk has advocated such a broad carbon tax, including on SpaceX’s rockets (which use kerosene and eventually methane).

There’s no evidence that the impact on the extremely low density part of the atmosphere makes any kind of environmental problem except perhaps for sensitive radio wave measurements (ie GPS, whose satellites are also launched on rockets).

>There’s no evidence that the impact on the extremely low density part of the atmosphere makes any kind of environmental problem

That is what people thought about automobiles emitting co2. If we have learned anything, we would be extremely wary of anything that causes big disruptions in the environments, how ever innocent it might seem...

That’s not true. We knew about the warming effect of CO2 since 1897 or earlier and over 100 years ago, we knew that continual burning of coal and other fossil fuels would cause considerable warming.

>we knew that continual burning of coal and other fossil fuels would cause considerable warming.

Wrong. We didn't know that. We hoped the co2 will be cleaned up by the mechanisms already in place, and we thought the effect would only be temporary. Just like we think the holes caused by the rockets are temporary now, and will not have any cascading effects.

Incredibly short sighted and We have learned nothing from history if we continue to reason like this.

Yeah, we did know: https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/coals-link-to-...

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