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A comment on SpaceX Starlink is now its own ASN and present at the Seattle Internet Exchange. Parent comment

Re:SpaceX Starlink is now its own ASN and present at the Sea... by tsimionescu on Thursday June 04, 2020 @03:29AM (#23413696)
Genuinely curious: any idea what the carbon footprint of this number of launches would be, as a ballpark?
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Re:SpaceX Starlink is now its own ASN and present at the Sea... by markonen on Thursday June 04, 2020 @04:53AM (#23414263)
The first and second stages of a Falcon 9 use a combined ~163 000 litres (43 000 gallons) of RP-1 fuel. This is less than the fuel capacity of a Boeing 777-300ER.

So if the Starlink launches happen twice a month, the carbon footprint from the fuel would be at least an order of magnitude smaller than that of a single long haul route of an airline.

Building the satellites and the rocket (including the expendable second stage) is obviously pretty carbon intensive too, but fuel is probably what you were thinking about when posing this question.

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Re:SpaceX Starlink is now its own ASN and present at the Sea... by KuiN on Thursday June 04, 2020 @04:49AM (#23414232)
Everyday Astronaut on YouTube has a great video on the environmental impact of rockets. 55 minutes long but it's fascinating. The TL;DW is they're not as bad as you'd expect. But not zero-emissions, obviously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4VHfmiwuv4

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Re:SpaceX Starlink is now its own ASN and present at the Sea... by dzhiurgis on Thursday June 04, 2020 @05:16AM (#23414377)
Starship gonna run on methane so most likely going to be carbon neutral.
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Re:SpaceX Starlink is now its own ASN and present at the Sea... by ovi256 on Thursday June 04, 2020 @07:39AM (#23415292)
Methane is a fossil fuel, so no way burning it is carbon neutral.
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Re:SpaceX Starlink is now its own ASN and present at the Sea... by growlist on Thursday June 04, 2020 @07:54AM (#23415418)
It'll be pretty big news if the methane they use to refuel Starship on Mars originates from a fossil source :D
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Re:SpaceX Starlink is now its own ASN and present at the Sea... by gpm on Thursday June 04, 2020 @10:44AM (#23417233)
Elon has discussed using the sabatier process on earth to create methane from CO2 to fuel it. Presumably the motivation would be a mix of PR and practicing for mars.
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Re:SpaceX Starlink is now its own ASN and present at the Sea... by sonusario on Thursday June 04, 2020 @08:12AM (#23415570)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-neutral_fuel

https://static.berkeleyearth.org/memos/fugitive-methane-and-...

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Re:SpaceX Starlink is now its own ASN and present at the Sea... by SEJeff on Thursday June 04, 2020 @11:37AM (#23418048)
ISRU methane fuel for starship is going to be eventually done on earth (and mars) for carbon neutral starship / superheavy launches.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201200...

TL;DNR: If you take methane out of the atmosphere and you put it back in the atmosphere, the carbon footprint is neutral.

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