Atmospheric scientist Laura Revell of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand has presented research showing that rocket exhaust in the atmosphere could erase some of the hard-won gains in reducing ozone depletion.
In a high-growth scenario for the space industry, there could be more than 2,000 launches per year, resulting in about 3 percent ozone loss, their modeling shows, which is equivalent to the atmospheric impacts of a bad wildfire season in Australia. Most of the damage is caused by chlorinated solid rocket fuel and black carbon in the plume, he said.
Black carbon can warm parts of the stratosphere by about half a degree Celsius by absorbing sunlight. It heats the surrounding air and can move winds that control storms and rainfall areas.
“It’s probably not a fuel type that we want to start using in large quantities in the future,” he said.
Researchers at the conference estimated that over the past five years, the mass of man-made material injected into the upper atmosphere by reentry has doubled to about one kiloton per year. For some metals, such as lithium, this amount is already much larger than that contributed by disintegrated meteorites.
In the emerging field of space stability science, researchers say that orbital space and near-space should be considered part of the global environment. A 2022 journal article co-authored by Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, argued that the upper reaches of the atmosphere are experiencing increased impacts from human activities.
The article states that the increasing commercial use of what appears to be a free resource is actually shifting its real costs onto others.
“If you put large amounts of catalytic metals into the atmosphere, I immediately think of geoengineering,” said Leonard Schultz, who studies space pollution at the University of Technology Braunschweig in Germany, at last year’s European Geosciences Union conference.
There may not be time to wait for more scientific certainty, Schultz said: “In 10 years, it may be too late to do anything about it.”
Bob Berwin is an Austria-based reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species and public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as an editor and assistant editor at community newspapers in the Colorado Rockies.
This story was originally published on Inside Climate News.
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