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.
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.