Climate
Six Hours of Aviation
A Starship launch puts about as much carbon dioxide into the air as sixteen full transatlantic flights. Every launch the United States has so far authorised — three sites, 145 flights a year — comes to roughly six hours of world aviation. Methane and oxygen is the cleanest chemistry in rocketry, and the carbon it adds is negligible. The things that genuinely are wrong are all cheap to fix, and not one of them is the fuel.
Every so often somebody notices that a Starship is very large, that it is filled with fossil natural gas, and that SpaceX would like to fly one most weeks, and concludes that the biggest rocket ever built must be a climate problem in …
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