Can We Get to Space without Damaging the Earth through Huge Carbon Emissions?

by David Verbeek and Helene Fouquet (Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times) When a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket blasts off on a plume of white smoke, hot gases shoot out of its 27 engines, creating a thrust equal to 18 Boeing 747 aircraft.

Upon reaching orbit, the world’s heaviest operational rocket will have burned about 400 metric tons of kerosene and emitted more carbon dioxide in a few minutes than an average car would in more than two centuries. That kind of shock to the atmosphere is stoking concerns about the effect that launching into orbit has on Earth, and it’s about to get worse.

“Climate change is real, and we don’t want to make it worse,” said Chris Larmour, chief executive of British rocket maker Orbex. The start-up, founded in 2015 and which has a contract with U.S. launch integrator TriSept Corp., uses bio-propane that it says can cut CO2 emissions by 90% compared with traditional launch fuel.

ArianeGroup is going a step further. Europe’s biggest launch company is working on a rocket that aims to be carbon-neutral by running on methane produced from biomass. Dubbed Ariane Next, the heavy-launcher project targets liftoff in 2030. READ MORE

Excerpt from Everyday Astronaut: Some might find it ironic that an organization like NASA, who studies our atmosphere, is Ok with rockets polluting it so much. Or isn’t it weird that Elon Musk, the same person who is pushing sustainable energy with Tesla, also has a rocket company that runs on fossil fuels?

And let’s not forget about Jeff Bezos, who just pledged 10 billion dollars to help combat climate change, and who will soon be frequently launching a rocket almost the size of the Saturn V moon rocket! Isn’t this all a little bit hypocritical?

But here is another note. A rocket running on hydrogen or methane can actually become mostly carbon neutral if the production of the fuels is powered by a renewable energy source.

Unfortunately most hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels by steam reforming natural gas, methane or coal gasification. When hydrogen is produced in this manner, it is not a very sustainable source of fuel.

But, hydrogen can be manufactured using electrolysis to extract it from water, although it is relatively inefficient, and you can actually create methane by just pulling carbon dioxide from the air and adding it to hydrogen using the Sabatier process.

This means you can actually extract the CO₂ from the air that is emitted from the rocket – or anything really, and turn it right back into rocket fuel for your next flight. I know this sounds a bit obtuse. Isn’t it going to take a lot of energy to do that and therefore will just create more emissions?

Again, not if you run your fuel production off of renewable energy. This is something SpaceX will likely roll out as a cost effective way to not only fuel their Starships, but also practice this vital refueling process for Mars!

That is right, in order to get back from Mars, SpaceX will need to have this exact process down. So it will probably make an awful lot of sense for them to utilize the Sabatier process basically right away so they are experts at it by the time humans will rely on it to get home. READ MORE