Bezos' New Shepard is fueled by liquid Hydrogen and Oxygen, it only emits water, no CO2, no soot.<p>Branson's SpaceShipTwo does release carbon, it burns approximately 3 tons of HTPB (basically rubber) per flight. The CO2 emissions from such a flight are roughly equivalent to 3500 miles of driving per paying passenger. That $250,000 ticket leads to as much CO2 entering the atmosphere as $60 of coal. At current rates, the cost to sequester that much carbon is $210, approximately 0.8% of the ticket price.<p>If every single billionaire on Earth each took a flight on SpaceShipTwo, it would release as much CO2 as 13 flights over the North Atlantic, of which there are normally 2500 per day. Odds are the environmental cost of getting those billionaires to Mojave would dwarf the cost of their rocket flights.
What surprisingly bugged me more than the potential climate impact was not feeling the same kind of excitement after seeing passengers in space during Virgin Galactics flight.<p>Dunno, but I've always felt some deeper sense of wonder when seeing astronauts fly to space or onboard the ISS. The vision to start a company like that aside, space tourists just had to shell out enough cash to go up there. This alone might be an exciting thought for us as a species, but it imho isn't what space travel should be about. It's hard to find any purpose in just shooting rich people to space.
Blue Origin uses oxygen and hydrogen in New Shepards's engines, which are way more climate-friendly than even airplane's kerosene, not to mention hybrid engine of Virgin Galactic's SS2.<p>Branson, having developed a working SS2, should now address issues of pollution produced by the chosen engine type. Switching to something greener is urgently needed.<p>Space tourism can be beneficial to climate, in some indirect ways. Robust orbital payload industry could help with controlling global effects of current crisis.
Doesn't Blue Origin use liquid hydrogen and oxygen for the launches? I get that upstream fuel generation here is often CO2 heavy, but wouldn't it be fairly straightforward to go zero emissions for the full lifecycle of these launches?
> Space tourism raises important moral questions. Should self-professed climate leaders walk the climate talk?<p>> A paper published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests that black carbon or soot deposited in the stratosphere from the launch of 1,000 private rockets could increase polar surface temperatures by 1°C.<p>> By some accounts, the image of Earth from Apollo 8 in 1968 led to the first Earth Day. But this is 2021, when the effects of the climate crisis are grimly visible.<p>There is quite a moral dilemma for those elite pushing the boundaries of space + climate change.
Contrary view: the only realistically sustainable way to address climate change is to colonize other planets and offload population, which starts with space travel.