Billionaires Claiming Climate Leadership Should Not Promote Space Tourism
forbes.com
forbes.com
Branson's SpaceShipTwo does release carbon, it burns approximately 3 tons of HTPB (basically rubber) per flight. The CO2 emissions from such a flight are roughly equivalent to 3500 miles of driving per paying passenger. That $250,000 ticket leads to as much CO2 entering the atmosphere as $60 of coal. At current rates, the cost to sequester that much carbon is $210, approximately 0.8% of the ticket price.
If every single billionaire on Earth each took a flight on SpaceShipTwo, it would release as much CO2 as 13 flights over the North Atlantic, of which there are normally 2500 per day. Odds are the environmental cost of getting those billionaires to Mojave would dwarf the cost of their rocket flights.
What’s going on is the “hypocrisy engine in action“.
“Well they can’t believe in climate change if they …”
Dunno, but I've always felt some deeper sense of wonder when seeing astronauts fly to space or onboard the ISS. The vision to start a company like that aside, space tourists just had to shell out enough cash to go up there. This alone might be an exciting thought for us as a species, but it imho isn't what space travel should be about. It's hard to find any purpose in just shooting rich people to space.
My fear is that this will happen without solving the environmental harm this will bring.
Branson, having developed a working SS2, should now address issues of pollution produced by the chosen engine type. Switching to something greener is urgently needed.
Space tourism can be beneficial to climate, in some indirect ways. Robust orbital payload industry could help with controlling global effects of current crisis.
Why? Each flight produces an amount of carbon that could be removed from the atmosphere by about $20 of carbon offsets or $1000 worth of carbon capture. Finding a greener fuel would be a really bad allocation of engineering resources.
Carbon offsets don't remove carbon, right? Otherwise they would be equivalent to carbon capture and given how cheap they are everyone would be hailing them as an incredible solution to our CO2 emission problem. Offsets are just an agreement to emit less. Less than... well, that's kind of arbitrary I suppose, which makes the whole thing a little fishy IMHO.
Anyway, I agree with your conclusion. I like the idea of billionaire space tourists paying the carbon capture cost to cover their trip though. Doesn't seem like it would cost enough for them to notice.
But perhaps I was being unfair to the more well run offset schemes.
Another more sensible declaration.
> A paper published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests that black carbon or soot deposited in the stratosphere from the launch of 1,000 private rockets could increase polar surface temperatures by 1°C.
> By some accounts, the image of Earth from Apollo 8 in 1968 led to the first Earth Day. But this is 2021, when the effects of the climate crisis are grimly visible.
There is quite a moral dilemma for those elite pushing the boundaries of space + climate change.
No moral dilemma but it makes good click-bait.
Clearly, the right short term solution is to freeze people.
Thankfully, we're based on replicators - we could colonize the galaxy by sending out only small numbers. But barring some very far-future tech, each fertile world is going to carry a large immobile population, and we're going to have to learn not to trash planets.