Does someone with more knowledge than me know if the co2 emissions from these kinds of rocket launches are big enough to make frequently launching and re-launching rockets into space a problem re. climate change? That’s a refrain I hear frequently but have no idea how true it is.
It’s a lot of fuel and significantly more than a single flight uses, but there’s orders of magnitudes more flights, so no, it doesn’t make a huge difference right now. With massively increased cadence it might eventually.
Starship plus Booster load roughly 1000 tons of methane. We use roughly 1,000,000 tons of kerosene a day (world wide).
The CO2 factor is basically nothing, one rocket flight would be on the order of 10 commercial jet flights. The problem is soot from non-hydrolox launch vehicles, black carbon deposited directly into the upper atmosphere which apparently has a greater effect on warming than all of commercial aviation's CO2 emissions combined.
Starship is methalox so it's somewhat more ecological than the kerosene burning falcon, but with the increased launch capacity, the rate at which it can deliver stuff to orbit, practically all of which eventually burns up in the upper atmosphere when EoL will likely have much more of a polluting effect in total.
There's about a thousand tons of methane on starship which come out to about 2750 tons of CO2.
For reference an average natural gas power plant produces 2000 tons 10000 tons of CO2 every day.
So if you fly a starship once per day that's as bad as one (1!) gas power plant.
The US emits 14 million tons of CO2 per day, out of which 4 million comes from power plants.
Now, suppose Starship is very successful and they have 10 launches a day. That will certainly have some environmental inpact, though it would hardly be noticable at the national scale.
However! It would be silly to restrict Starship, for the very simple reason that we have no alternative for space travel, when we do have alternatives for energy generation.
I think you’re off by an order of magnitude, as 10/day would be a failure of the program right? The goal is many hundreds per day, at 10+ pads launching at an hourly cadence to get millions of people to Mars in a couple decades.
Surely you need way more than 10 per day to achieve the goals of the program.
[−]montenegrohugo · 2026-11-15 Sun 14:51 UTC ·
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at 10 day you can just do climate engineering or carbon capture in some other way for a fraction of added cost.
CO2 is not an issue. There's way bigger issues out there.
Are you equally concerned about the shipping industry?
[−]sacred_numbers · 2026-11-15 Sun 15:10 UTC ·
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Starship launching at a high enough frequency to affect climate change would also allow it to solve climate change, first with orbital shades, then perhaps with space based solar (or orbital mirrors for increased production of ground based solar). At a minimum it's going to offset a lot of natural gas that would otherwise be used for data centers, assuming Starmind works out as well.
The environmental limit for Starship launches will not be CO2, but rather water deposition in the stratosphere and above. This will still require a hefty launch rate to reach.
Starship plus Booster load roughly 1000 tons of methane. We use roughly 1,000,000 tons of kerosene a day (world wide).
Starship is methalox so it's somewhat more ecological than the kerosene burning falcon, but with the increased launch capacity, the rate at which it can deliver stuff to orbit, practically all of which eventually burns up in the upper atmosphere when EoL will likely have much more of a polluting effect in total.
There's about a thousand tons of methane on starship which come out to about 2750 tons of CO2.
For reference an average natural gas power plant produces 2000 tons 10000 tons of CO2 every day.
So if you fly a starship once per day that's as bad as one (1!) gas power plant.
The US emits 14 million tons of CO2 per day, out of which 4 million comes from power plants.
Now, suppose Starship is very successful and they have 10 launches a day. That will certainly have some environmental inpact, though it would hardly be noticable at the national scale.
However! It would be silly to restrict Starship, for the very simple reason that we have no alternative for space travel, when we do have alternatives for energy generation.
Surely you need way more than 10 per day to achieve the goals of the program.
CO2 is not an issue. There's way bigger issues out there.