It may not seem like a big issue but it speaks to the attitude of billionaires. I am no longer free to vent personal amounts of coolant from a refrigerator but Elon Musk can punch all of the holes he wants with his expensive rockets.
I get what and agree with what your trying to say but a better comparison is needed
Furthermore it’s an issue that affects all launches, by ULA, NASA, ESA, whoever, not just SpaceX.
But sure, go ahead and ignore all of that and make a thoughtless dig against one person, in one country, running one rocket company for the crime of being successful at it.
Journalists are not scientists.
Did you mean FAA rather than FCA?
The FAA did ask SpaceX to do a lot of additional ground level items: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/13/faa-spacex-starship-environm...
The reviewers at th ed FCA were unlikely to be in the thousands, the rest mentioned I would completely discount.
The "crime" is that one person is not stopping to ask whether we should. There is a lot of hubris is there. Regardless, nobody should get a free pass to wreck the earth (but this is kittens, putting tons of C02 in the air is generally free, so... yeah...)
Looks like the biggest "green" issue is the rockets burns tons of fuel. Thd FAA review was a green light. This phenomena of punching holes was hopefully considered by the FAA (but at this point, can only hope that everything was at least considered)
My point is there is extensive and persistent oversight, debate and opportunities for input and objection. Journalists play a role in the public interest in any democratic society.
One person didn’t ask whether we should? Space technology has been controversial since its inception. Citizens, journalists and politicians have been questioning it throughout its history. You really honestly think you’re the first person, or this is the first time anyone has stopped to wonder about it?
Incidentally, there’s one particularly famous example of this from 1970 that’s a bit of a classic: https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-...
Of course nobody should get a free pass to wreck the Earth. That’s a cartoonishly absurd caricature of what’s going on.
>My point is there is extensive and persistent oversight, debate and opportunities for input and objection.
the point that other commentators have made, which has seemingly been ignored, is that being the person with the most wealth in the entire world allows one to ignore a lot of the checks and balances associated with any activity.
A lot of the 'extensive and persistent oversight' comes from 1) internal employees and 2) government officials that have been 'taken out to dinner' enough times that they don't want to lose the opportunity to schmooze with what amounts to be the most and influential people in the world.
this is essentially how all of American aerospace operates, and I speak from personal experience -- most groups don't have the luxury of being a cult of personality on top of the thick wallets, however.
You can call CO2 harmless all you want, but the reality is that we have a tenuous grasp, if any at all, on what spilling hundreds of tons in a minute will add up to [0], and that's only a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the environmental accumulative 'unknowns'.[1]
In effect Musk's pass to wreck the Earth was by no means free, he paid for it. The problem is that someone , anyone with money and pop interest, can do that.
I'm by no means anti-space, but this trend of pretending that there isn't a sacrifice made on Earth to fuel these mega-ventures is absolutely naive, and the tragedy is that the every-person is going to be the one paying the bill; it won't be Musk's redirected billions.
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220713-how-to-make-rock... [1]:https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astrophysics/greenhouse-gas...
I read comments like this almost every time SpaceX is mentioned here, and climate crisis extremists bang on about it endlessly. It’s impossible to ignore, it’s just that most people disagree.
>you can call CO2 harmless all you want…
I did not do so, thank you very much. I’m aware of the issues. Climate change is a real problem, but exaggerated histrionics aren’t going to solve problems.
>Musk’s pass to wreck the Earth… pretending that there isn’t a sacrifice being made…
He has no such pass, and nobody’s pretending anything of the sort. See above about exaggerated histrionics. They’re so obviously absurd it does the climate change cause no good whatsoever. To mainstream voters it makes extinction rebellion folks look like a fanatical cult dissociated from reality, and by association undermines the credible and important climate change cause. A cause Musk has probably done more to physically advance through direct personal action than all but maybe a handful of other human beings on Earth.
Journalists are great, but it's not like they have a many million dollar budget to study this. The hole in the ionosphere seems to be news, seemingly this is an area where humanity is missing _lots_ of knowledge.
There are some interesting reads on whether Musk is a net benefit or not (reasonable people can disagree here)
> this brings us to the first fundamental problem: Elon Musk does what he wants and wants everyone else to do the same. He only sees the advantages of his approach, without ever asking himself about the consequences. It is certain that the aerospace industry has played a fundamental role in the study of climate, thanks to the weather satellites placed in orbit. The problem is that Elon Musk wants to multiply the number of satellites by 20, which will directly disrupt space operations and astronomical research.
https://bonpote.com/en/elon-musk-solution-or-nightmare-for-t...
Personally, I think the AI car thing has been a distraction and has been an excuse for continuing to put all of our transport eggs in the single-occupancy-vehicle basket. Had Musk pushed the EV numbers he is pushing now back 20 years ago - I would agree that he had done a lot. As-is, for EVs, I view Musk a bit like Steve Jobs, brought the touch-screen phone forward by several years and helped the market adoption, but touch-screen phones would have happened without Jobs.
There are some other interesting reads too from less biased sources:
> It's not surprising that Musk’s socially-responsible message of warning about environmental crisis combined with his massive capital success building electric vehicles (EVs) has given him a messianic status among some of his many admirers. But this status also means that by attacking the Build Back Better legislation, which is by far the United States’ most significant legislation ever aimed at fighting climate change, Musk is providing ammunition to climate deniers and fossil fuel industry opponents of efforts to protect the U.S. from climate change, create good jobs, and lead the world in technology and policies.
> If Musk is really serious about combatting climate change, we need him to support an all-hands-on-deck approach. The commitments, innovation, and investments of private companies must be matched with government policies and incentives.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/margooge/2022/01/17/where-does-...
And then this article is perhaps the best so far:
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-isnt-a-climate-hero-just-becau...
> Let’s look first at Musk’s achievements in both electric cars and solar power, which Manjoo singles out. In many ways, Tesla is certainly deserving of a lot of praise
> Meanwhile, Musk has dismissed the idea of improving existing public transit—which experts say is arguably more important in cutting emissions than popularizing electric cars.
> "I read comments like this almost every time SpaceX is mentioned here, and climate crisis extremists bang on about it endlessly. It’s impossible to ignore, it’s just that most people disagree."
Respectfully, I feel you are responding to those comments, rather than the ones placed here. How can anyone disagree with the statement that the impact of rocket launches on the atmosphere is not well understood. AFAIK, that is fact. If there are such studies, that would be super interesting, to my knowledge, those studies have not been done (and could not be done because nobody was launching rockets at an appreciable frequency for anyone to even study it).
If those studies had been done, I would not expect the punching of holes in the ionosphere to be news.
> You really honestly think you’re the first person, or this is the first time anyone has stopped to wonder about it?
I don't think that, I didn't imply that, and wondering if I was the first person to ever wonder that for the first time is putting words in my mouth.
My question is whether anyone that was in a position to know and was also not being payed off wondered this. Given the lack of science around this, the major players I think are more concerned with going further than they are in really studying exactly whether they should. That makes no sense for SpaceX to devout half of their budget to study why they should not be launching rockets. If they are not studying that, who exactly is?
> Of course nobody should get a free pass to wreck the Earth. That’s a cartoonishly absurd caricature of what’s going on.
There have been plenty of free passes to wreck the earth. Examples are subsidies going out to industries that pollute. These free-passes go back in time, recall the train companies giving free tickets to those that would shoot Bison from the windows of the train. We can also talk about deforestation, that most old growth forests have been chopped down and so many tree farms are now taking their place (tree farms grow overly dense, and very sickly trees that have nowhere near the same positive impact as old growth does). There are so many examples of free passes being given.. Why else are so many rivers toxic and unswimmable? The fact we have so many things and areas that are wrecked serves as counter-point.
Beyond this, I think 'serf' responds pretty well, I will not add further.
I'd like the ability to visit space at some point in my life, and I'd like our species to become experienced at doing things in space. Like, if we need to be able to deploy something in space to decrease the amount of heat we're taking in to try and buy more time to decarbonize before we're completely F'd because of all the people venting potent greenhouse gasses from their HVAC systems, it'd be nice if we already had a space industrial complex capable of supporting that goal.
It seems that most of our most powerful leaders (so-called) are sociopaths or psychopaths.[1] Are people who are pathologically incapable of basic empathy and compassion going to be moved by a joyride to watch the Big Blue Ball? I wouldn’t hold my breath.
The only thing I read about resulting from that trip was Shatner's induced depression over the sight.
Still no astronaut says that they don't want to go back because it contributes to destroying the planet, do they?
Don't get me wrong: I would probably throw my principles out the window if I got to become an astronaut. But I don't think we can say that going in space makes you a big environmental activist.
You certainly mean the direct carbon footprint, right? Not counting what was involved in building the rocket, importing the material, test launches while developing the technology, etc?
> It's not a huge impact compared to how much they advance our understanding of how to live in space
Not sure I get that comparison. So you say "it's okay to contribute destroying life conditions on Earth in this case, given how much it helps us understand how to make people survive around Earth"? We can't move the Earth population to live in orbit once surviving on the ground is impossible, so it's a bit like saying "the carbon footprint of burning tires is not huge compared to how practical it is as a way to get rid of tires", IMO.
We won't, as a species, go live in orbit, we won't go live on the Moon, and we won't go live on March. And we quite certainly will not ever reach the next star (which is what, 4 light-years away?). We don't need to understand how to live in space in order to survive on Earth. And right now we are destroying Earth. We need to first learn how to survive on Earth, and then maybe we can consider playing with human spaceflights again.
> I haven't run the numbers on Starship, but my impression is that it'll be significantly more efficient.
Again, you're missing all the indirect impact, and then all the rebound effects. Every success of SpaceX gets us into a world where the space business (because it is now a business) emits more CO2. I don't know why people don't get the memo, but right now our survival depends on reducing our CO2 emissions, not increasing them.
wrt direct vs. indirect emissions, rockets are incredibly thin cans full of fuel that immediately gets burnt. The direct emissions will almost certainly dominate the embodied carbon from manufacturing, especially when they're launched >10 times. Once you start including the infrastructure, it's less clear, but it's a close-enough estimate for setting the context in an internet comment. Is the value we get from an astronaut doing work in space worth the carbon footprint of a few American families for a year? I think so, I get the sense that you don't agree. That's fine.
You make it sound like we get a lot of value from astronauts surviving in space, and that the CO2 footprint of the space business is almost nothing.
I disagree with both. They don't really make any useful work (that could not be done by robots) other than surviving there, and the carbon footprint of the space business is going to grow much bigger (if those companies are successful) than what you seem to believe.
> it's less clear, but it's a close-enough estimate for setting the context in an internet comment
It surely is convenient to ignore them :-)
In contrast, a SpaceX launch generates around 300 tons of CO2 [2], totaling about 72,600 tons of CO2 for the 242 launches to date. We mustn't forget the wide-ranging benefits these launches provide, from improved weather forecasting and GPS services to crewed missions to the International Space Station.
If we subtract the CO2 emissions from SpaceX launches from the CO2 savings attributed to Tesla, we see a net savings of about 89,927,400 tons of CO2.
90,000,000 / 72,600 = 1,240x
The emissions from his remaining companies are comparably negligible. Furthermore, this calculation doesn't account for Tesla's influence on the automotive industry, propelling other manufacturers to accelerate their production of EVs. As Tesla's sales continue to rise and EVs become more accessible through Tesla's charging network, these benefits will be multiplied. Also, this doesn't factor in the positive environmental impact of Tesla's energy division, which likely offsets the emissions from all of his other companies on its own.
[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/19/billionaires...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
Aren't you presuming that Tesla is the only seller of electric vehicles, and those who bought Tesla would thus never even consider buying any other electric vehicle?
I mean, currently Tesla represents around 15% of the overall EV sales, and BYD auto alone representing 21%. This means that as of right now around of 85% of all ev buyers are not buying Tesla.
The opening of Tesla's Supercharger network has been instrumental in making EVs from all manufacturers viable for a broader demographic in the U.S. Moreover, for a considerable period, Tesla struggled to meet the high demand for their vehicles, with many potential owners enduring long wait times to receive their cars. Given the limited and less attractive EV alternatives at that time, it's unlikely that these consumers would have opted for another EV.
In the U.S., where Tesla has a market share close to 60%, Chinese automakers like BYD, SAIC, or Geely have not yet established a significant presence. Thus, most American consumers would not have likely considered these other EVs.
Additionally, Tesla's pricing strategy has exerted downward pressure on the overall EV market, making these vehicles more accessible to the masses. Other manufacturers are indeed emulating Tesla's approach, further acknowledging Tesla's influence on the industry's transition to electric vehicles.
As to the emissions offset calculation, the figures referenced consider each Tesla vehicle as a replacement for a conventional gasoline car. Whether a Tesla purchaser might have considered another EV is irrelevant to the emissions reductions associated with each Tesla vehicle. Also the amount of emissions needed to offset SpaceX emissions is comical and obviously Tesla covers those even with a small fraction of the vehicles they sell.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/20/investing/china-tesla-ev-pric...
https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-ev-production-slow-than...
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/02/1152586942/tesla-price-cuts-f...
https://electrek.co/2021/11/08/ford-ceo-praises-tesla-intern...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/28/tesla-is-setting-the-bar-for...
https://electrek.co/2023/06/05/gm-ceo-tesla-lead-electric-ca...
https://insideevs.com/news/652293/ferrari-ceo-says-tesla-was...
You're jumping to conclusions. Just because Tesla exists that does not mean that all hypothetical transitions from fossil fuel to electric should be attributed to Tesla.
I repeat: Tesla is responsible for only 15% of EV sales, and nothing leads to believe that the remaining 85% of the EV market does not serve as a substitute good. Claiming that Tesla is an environment protection messiah is peak corporate worship.
Because it takes two to tango. In both cases "all the credit" or "all the debit" goes to the manufacturer for making the product AND the customer for paying for it.
Though, everyone that bought a tesla, they would have bought a gas vehicle instead? I think that is potentially a very invalid assumption which negates that savings calculation. Yes, EVs can be cleaner than conventional cars, but it still adds an impact. Less bad does not necessarily mean all good.
The mentions of teslas charging network sounds very PR heavy. What if that network flops in 5 years and meanwhile the non-common standard means a global charging infrastructure is never properly developed?
Musk's hyperloop was supposed to be built in a few towns that lost money on the deals and pulled funds from other transit projects. Those transit projects never happened.
I don't think anyone can at all decide whether musk, tesla and his companies are yet a net good without the benefit of more time and 20/20 hindsight.
And self driving taxis, if they ever do make it which is still waaaaay out even by Elon time, are not going to balance it out.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/29/california-h...
Ok. So you agree Musk tried to sabotage California high-speed rail, but as he failed then... We should ignore it?
- If Musk tried to sabotage something and he failed: his intent doesn’t matter
- But the project that he tried to sabotage probably should have failed anyway
— The Musk Prayer
That's specious reasoning at best. It's absurd how you try to depict a Robber Baron move as a simplistic fiscally responsible stance. It's even sillier once you realize the only reason Elon Musk did his best to sabotage the program was because he believed it would be a success and thus a threat to his bottom line.
I really do not understand this corporate worship nonsense, specially when dealing with this specific corporation.
The only specious reasoning I'm seeing here is the weird assumption that one high speed rail line in California would meaningfully suppress Tesla car sales. It's competing with air travel, not car ownership.
It's ridiculous enough to suggest that it would suppress the sale of cars generally. It's especially ridiculous to suggest that it would suppress sales of Tesla vehicles. It's a 760 mile round trip between SF and LA — not an issue for an EV if you're doing it occasionally. But someone buying a new car for the specific purpose of driving this route simply wouldn't consider an EV.
It had literally zero impact on California High-Speed Rail.
EVs are mostly good over the long term, but they are not an instant win button.
So battery production is a good way to transport energy from where it's cheap to produce to where it's needed, much better than bitcoin.
The main effect of mass is when comparing 2 different EVs: one that is twice as heavy has ~twice the initial production emissions, as well as twice the energy consumption (and emissions, as the case may be). Even with EVs, large and heavy cars are very wasteful.
> Even with EVs, large and heavy cars are very wasteful.
Yes, I am pretty anti-car and anti-big car so sure that is true.