Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket tests in Texas are emitting so much methane you can see it from space::So much you can see it from the ISS in space.
Fun notes from America’s other privately owned, publicly funded space program. Even if you think that privatization of space is a good thing (you’re wrong, it’s not, but let’s just assume for the sake of argument that it is) how do you justify the fact that the public takes on huge swaths of the development cost, then has to pay to use the service, then has to pay to clean up externalities like an ocean of methane in the atmosphere?
I would say purely “because it works”. SpaceX has received a ton of funding, for sure. But they’ve delivered incredible advancements in reusable rocketry, methalox fuel cycles, cost to orbit and much more, while SLS was literally a flying scrap pile that was late and over budget despite being reused 1980s tech.
Let’s not pretend that NASA rockets were really public work either, with most of the development and construction done by contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Aerojet Rocketdyne and more… But these old guard companies were happy to keep turning out the same old product with incremental improvements.
SpaceX could have been a tremendous failure or success with the risks they’ve taken, and we’re all lucky it turned out to be a success (so far…). It says it all when they are going to launch Orion on SLS but Starship is going to be waiting there at the moon for them. Well, if it doesn’t blow up on the pad.
The space program of every nation have always worked that way. Even the Soviets were using Rhode Schwarz made gyroscopes. The Apollo rockets were built by the private sector.
The only real difference now is the ferrying contracts.
Because public programs were somehow even more expensive for the same externalities and service.
If BO is being that careless with methane emissions then they are breaking laws. Report them
BO used to mean body odour and this sentence still makes sense in France
The environmental agencies are corrupt pieces of shit.
Well, just when I manage to stop worrying about climate change so much…
The hottest summer in recorded history is when you decide to stop worrying about climate change?
Eating the billionaires sounds more and more attractive every day.
Eating the rich just gives you gas (and prion disease). Compost the rich.
It sounds like they should be more careful with how they store their methane.
I do want to stress though, that I think that space technology is the single most important subject we can focus on, except maybe medical. If extravagant trips for billionaire’s can fund a bunch of it for now, that’s fine by me. Only really means that governments should be doing more.
Every day, the sun emits roughly a billion times more energy than the earth uses. That is, all our technology, all our food, all animals, all plants and all the energy needed to create all weather combined consumes about one billionth of the sun’s output. The rest is sent into deep space.
This waste of the sun’s energy is so vast, that we as a species absolutely want to start capturing more of it as soon as possible, rather than squabbling in the mud for fractions of the 0.0000001% of the sun’s output the earth uses today. Obviously we need our planet to survive until then, but getting proper infrastructure in orbit and beyond is such a massive game changer.
but getting proper infrastructure in orbit and beyond
Ah, there is the catch. Don’t forget how you plan on getting that power safely back to earth.
True. Doing that wouldn’t be easy right now.
However, it doesn’t necessarily need to get back to Earth. If we have power up in space, it gets much easier to run mining operations on asteroids, the moon etc. As soon as we have both power and minerals, we can also start putting factories in orbit instead of on Earth, reducing energy need down here.
The stuff those factories produce can be dropped down to Earth, OR we use that stuff in space to build even more infrastructure. In fact, at this point it becomes feasible to build really nice space stations that people can go live on if they want. Eventually, we’d even have the production capacity to build O’Neill Cylinders.
Now we can just continue building and mining in space, while developing or preserving Earth as we like.
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Which is why we should not be leaving it to these billionaires.
FUCKING FUND NASA instead of these fascists
Yeah, but prior to spacex coming along, NASA had done nothing major for ages. We can blame the system or the politicking, but possibly the one good thing Elon did with his fortune was revive the space industry.
I agree to some of it, but also disagree on other parts.
Energy availability, in the future of humanity, will not be the constraining factor. There will be enoigh electric energy from solar panels on planetary surfaces (be it Earth or others). Resources (mining, plants) will be the constraining factor for economy.
Be that as it may, my main point would be that basic orbital and interplanetary infrastructure is an incredibly worthwhile investment since it will allow us to start tapping into energy collection, as well as mining, of a different order of magnitude than we currently have access to on earth :)
Yeah, my point was kinda that you would need to land on a solid surface to mine metals. But now that I think about it, it could also be done on asteroids.
Yo dawg we heard you like greenhouse gases.
So we have hydrogen as rocket fuel that does not produce greenhouse gasses when burned and they decide to develop methane as a fuel source instead! Why!?!
Each fuel has it’s own use case, but in the case of reusable rockets…
Hydrogen is harder to store, it leaks out of everything. Methane can sit in a tank for a long time. Holding a tank of methane so you can relight a rocket and land after being in space for a long time is a big advantage, and keeps you from having to throw away everything each flight.
Methane is easier to store and doesn’t embrittle the pressure vessel.
Every day on Lemmy is a TIL with knowledgeable responses like these 👇
Hydrogen itself is a strong greenhouse gas and leaks from everything, so it wouldn’t necessarily be better.
Hydrogen requires energy to get, which practically requires fuel to be burned. Sure, you could use green energy, but you could also still build the green energy and just offset other energy demand elsewhere, which would take dirty energy off the grid.
This isn’t mentioning all the issues with hydrogen, the largest probably being that it does not like being contained. It’s literally just a proton and electron. It’s tiny, so really nothing can contain it perfectly.
Dudes the fuckin antichrist
“Oh poo…”
- three generations inbred billionaire heir having their view of earth ruined by methane clouds during their million dollar space tourism flight.
The state air regulator, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, doesn’t impose limits on methane emissions or require disclosure of releases.
Well there’s your problem.
Let’s not make dirty industrial activity clean, let’s move it off world (destroying another different planet). Because, you know, that’s apparently easier than actually solving the problem.
Honestly? You can’t collapse the moon’s ecosystem because the moon doesn’t have an ecosystem.
Yeah, the moon doesn’t have an ecosystem.
It’s important to note that we know for sure that the moon has no ecosystem, because every ecosystem is based on plants/solar irradiation as a source for energy, and therefore it would have to be on the surface.
There’s no “hidden” ecosystems or underground oceans with life in them.
I never said anything specific to an eco system
Then it needs to stop.
I guess his ex wife will need to fund methane capture programs now to tidy up his mess
I dislike Blue Origin as much as the next guy, but IMO the article (or at least the headline) distracts from the real problem here (the fossil fuel industry):
An air permit application filed with the TCEQ in January 2020 said the company expected to routinely dump LNG into the air to the tune of 3.4 million cubic feet a year, which would work out to more than 60 tons of methane.
Of course, Blue Origin’s emissions pale in comparison with those from its suppliers in the natural gas industry. Wells and pipelines in the Permian Basin, a huge oilfield near the rocket site, are thought to give off some 2.7 million tons of methane a year
Well that stinks.
