Starship from South Padre Island (Go Nakamura/Reuters)
SpaceX’s latest test flight launched mid-April from Boca Chica, Texas, and resulted in a midair explosion about four minutes into the flight over the Gulf of Mexico. The model tested, SpaceX’s Starship, is the most powerful rocket to date, towering 400 feet above onlookers at the event. The craft was observed passing through a period of maximum aerodynamic pressure, an important milestone for most ships, before tumbling down and finally ending in detonation. The first stage of decoupling was seen to fail, though the precise cause of this failure or the cause of the explosion in general is unknown.
However flashy, this launch is an important and promising step for the Starship project and the future of aviation in general. Though definitely falling short of the proposed hour-and-a-half flight plan, the fact that the craft left the launchpad to begin with proves that the craft’s development is progressing smoothly. Furthermore, the Starship’s brief airborne stint provides the company with a great deal of data regarding the craft’s performance in the air that can be used to refine its design. To quote the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Daniel Dumbacher, “It’s not a failure. It’s a learning experience.” NASA unsurprisingly commended SpaceX’s developments. The organization is relying on the technology for the Artemis III mission, a manned lunar mission currently slotted for 2025 and the first in 50 years, though the current pace of the technology leaves that date optimistic. The sheer power and reusability of Starship also make it a prime workhorse for transporting large amounts of cargo to space for far cheaper, including more powerful telescopes and robotic exploration missions. “[The reuse of rockets] has massive potential to change the game and transportation to orbit,” remarked Phil Larson, White House space advisor during the Obama administration. “And it could enable whole new classes of missions.”
Of course, SpaceX’s flight was not without its costs, and not just of the economic variety; the massive explosion, SpaceX’s practices, and spacecraft in general all pose severe threats to the state of our climate. Initially, the test intended for the rocket to fall into the ocean rather than be recovered, a prospect not without its own concerns. The blast instead caused widespread and severe damage to the surrounding area. Debris poured on the local city of Port Isabel. Chunks of shrapnel, concrete, and rebar punctured the coast of Boca Chica and washed up on shores all along the Gulf of Mexico for weeks. Several fires began and spread under the ship’s unchecked thrust, covering several acres of land. Local federally protected shorebird nests were found by environmentalist researchers feet from flung concrete. Over three hundred acres of total scarred earth were left in the wake of the SpaceX Starship.
A lot of this damage can be attributed to a shady and rushed launch. Several common instruments of launch infrastructure, such as flame trenches for diverting the violent blaze or a metal plate to prevent the aforementioned blowback of launchpad chunks. SpaceX managed to squeeze by federal regulations by offering an environmental report to the Federal Aviation Administration with statistics that fell short of legitimate numbers and a static fire test that only subjected the pad to fifty percent of the craft’s total strength. Whether the cause for these deliberate oversights was haste or greed cannot be known. Regardless, the Starship program has been grounded by the FAA, and the company has been made subject to the organization’s mishap response plan, which demands that SpaceX participate with government agencies to remove debris and report on damages.
Though there was undoubtedly a great deal of misconduct regarding the Starship launch, the explosion calls to attention the greater issue of the sustainability of spacecraft in regard to the current climate crisis. The act of igniting immense stores of fuel and spreading it upwards in of itself sounds like a damaging concept in itself, largely because it is. The twin industries of aircraft and spacecraft fail to compare today, but only because of the sheer number of flights when compared to launches. In the year 2020, 114 orbital launches were attempted according to NASA, compared to a daily average of 100,000 plane flights. When considering things in a passenger-to-passenger ratio, the relationship looks a lot different. By mass alone, rocket launches produce 25-75 times more tonnes of CO2 per passenger. Associate Professor Eloise Marais, a researcher at the University College London currently studying the environmental impact of fuel and industry, found that the amount of emissions from the spacecraft industry is increasing by 5.6% a year with the advent and growth of space tourism. Marais’ team, composed of researchers from UCL, MIT, and the University of Cambridge, proposes that black carbon emissions will more than double after just three years of these space tourism launches.
To make matters worse, the particulates emitted by spaceships are worse for the environment than others. Planes typically fly at an altitude of about 11 kilometers, about a hundredth of the total altitude of the Earth’s atmosphere. Spaceships, on the other hand, dump emissions directly into the upper atmosphere, where they linger for far longer and cause far more direct damage to the ozone layer and, by extension, the environment as a whole. These particles were also found by the research group at UCL to be 500 times more efficient at keeping heat in the atmosphere than all other sources of soot.
The developments SpaceX has created are promising, yes, and immensely exciting regarding our future with the stars. But until the whole industry of space is reworked, the practice of these accelerating launches as a whole is only adding to the problems at home.
Works Cited: https://pastebin.com/ZLg1jy8Q