Space Nuggets - 23/2024 - Missions to space, at the cost of environmental risk?

In this week's important Space Nugget, Dr Emma Gatti talks about an unpopular opinion with regard to space missions such as Starship , Starliner etc. These missions require significant amount of test runs and test flights which have often ended in mid air explosions raising the question of - How much environmental risk can the space industry take ?

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Please also note - We recorded this live at the ILA Airshow in Berlin, hence please note the disturbance in audio or any picked up noise was unintentional.

#starship #spacex #spacemission #boeing #starliner

[raymondwright]

Everything that humanity does is an environmental problem. Space launch can be reasonably compared to the air transport industry, where the volume of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere every day, is far greater than a single launch of the Starship heavy booster, so the activities of SpaceX are, surely, an insignificant addition to global carbon dioxide additions.SpaceX could eliminate even that small problem by (1) extracting the methane that they use from the atmosphere and the oxygen by solar or wind-generated electricity. They could, with some gain in efficiency, , use both the hydrogen and oxygen, generated by the electrolysis of water. That would leave only a trail of water vapour in the atmosphere Test flight 4 was good to see, though it was a little disappointing that the Starship was so badly damaged by the re-entry braking. I guess that the solution will be to use a more refractory material (e.g. "carbon-carbon") on all leading edges, or remove some of the orbital momentum by using the rocket engines. doing the latter would, of course, reduce the mass of payload that can be taken to orbit. On the Boeing Starliner, I'm amazed that Boeing is persisting with it, since it is not a re-usable system, which is bound to make the cost of launches much higher, in comparison with fully-re-usable systems. I'm not expecting many Starliner flights.