> Current rocket launches have a negligible effect on total carbon emissions — Everyday Astronaut found they accounted for 0.0000059 percent of global carbon emissions in 2018, while the airline industry produced 2.4 percent the same year.
> But the long-term effect is less clear, especially as companies like SpaceX move from hosting 26 launches in a year to 1,000 launches per rocket in a year.
> “I think we can guess that rockets won't be a huge impact on the environment, and they probably won't stand out as a sole source of new problems,” Darin Toohey, professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences, tells Inverse. “But they will add to the growing list of activities that have negative impacts on the environment.”
Very true, I don't disagree that its not 100% pure and 'good', but I think space technology has a very important value in our society to explore, and is _especially_ important in solving problems for humanity down the line. As for Climate, without a healthy space industry, our climate observation tools would be set back decades. The first step to dealing with a problem is to become aware of it.
I guess the point is, maximize value per-launch, ideally as far in the net-negative direction as possible. I know that private companies do this already (it's kind of built in to the market of launch contract awards) but I am not sure private companies are going to be better in terms of climate vs well-funded public civilian space science agencies, because they are also incentivized to maximize the number of launches.
It's bleak. Launching things into space is unsustainable and should be minimized.