As a nerdy member of GenX, I can state with pride and shame that I watched Buck Rogers in the early 80s and was constantly fascinated by all the weird ways their writers found for fictional 24th century scientists to misunderstand the relics from the 20th century. I’ve gone thru life wondering if the stories of today will survive through books and other records or if some cataclysm will erase all but a few archeological sites, making that kind of a bizarre future a reality.
One of Earth’s greatest existential threats is climate change, and in recent weeks we’ve learned that space flight is doing even more harm to our atmosphere than previously thought. In June, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned us that Kerosene-burning rockets are emitting black carbon – or soot – into the stratosphere where it can damage the ozone layer we’ve worked so hard to repair. A 10 fold increase in launches – as trend lines point toward happening – would change atmospheric circulation patterns. Other kinds of rocket fuel still need analysis, as do the effects of particles being added to the atmosphere as falling satellites burn up in the atmosphere. Space flight, it turns out, is dangerous in more ways than we knew.
We also have to worry about those rockets that don’t quite make it. A new paper in Geophysical Research Letters with lead author Y. V. Yasyukevich describes how the November 2023 explosion of a SpaceX StarShip at an altitude of 90km created a non-chemical hole in the Earth’s ionosphere. To quote from their paper’s summary,
The rocket launch and explosion produced an unexpected response in the ionosphere—the ionized part of the Earth’s atmosphere. The Starship flew at a velocity, exceeding the local sound speed, and generated cone-like atmospheric shock-acoustic waves. Most unexpectedly, the observed disturbances represented long and intensive multi-oscillation wave structures that propagated northward, which is unusual for disturbances driven by a rocket launch. The Starship explosion also generated a large-amplitude total electron content depletion that could have been reinforced by the impact of the spacecraft’s fuel exhaust in the lower atmosphere.
It turns out that having massive structures explode in the upper atmosphere isn’t entirely good for the atmosphere… and right now we don’t fully understand the consequences of what we’re doing.
This is your reminder, technology is neither good nor evil, but when we use technology without fully understanding the consequences, the outcomes can be more negative than we might like.