Long considered trivial, the effects of rocket launches and reentering space debris on global warming and ozone loss could soon become too large to ignore
Spaceflight, despite its origins in cold war saber-rattling, is often portrayed as a purely beneficial endeavor that somehow helps all of humanity: Satellites provide invaluable planet-scale situational awareness and connectivity. Space telescopes and interplanetary probes deliver transformative discoveries about our place in the universe. Astronautical missions help satisfy our species’ innate exploratory urges while also inspiring new generations of scientists and engineers.
The team reported that black carbon particles released by rockets are almost 500 times more efficient at holding heat in the atmosphere, thus having a greater effect on global warming than aircraft and other earthbound sources. Soot is “emitted by rockets burning hydrocarbon-based fuel,” says study co-author Robert Ryan of UCL. “And soot emitted directly into the stratosphere is very efficient at causing heating.
“We looked at hypothetical scenarios, in terms of the amount of rockets going up within the next couple of decades and how the climate might respond,” says lead author Christopher Maloney, a research scientist at NOAA and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colo. “We saw that there would be stratospheric warming. The overturning circulation in the stratosphere slows down and this has an impact on ozone.
“Everybody expects the space business to grow a lot, and that’s the hitch,” Ross says. “Given the growth, given the changing mix of reentry, launch and propellants used, all of this changing in evolution, we really are required to tamp down the uncertainty so we can reliably predict what the future will be.”
There is, for instance, a paucity of measurements for some of the atmosphere’s outer layers, where the gradual transition to space begins. Too low to be easily accessed by satellites, too high to be reached by meteorological balloons, this scarcely studied region has been dubbed the “ignorosphere.” Yet it could prove crucial to quantifying reentry’s top-to-bottom impacts on Earth’s atmosphere and climate.
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