Not car-hours, but a Falcon 9 launch apparently has similar impact to a 777 crossing the Atlantic. Not nothing, but surprisingly little all things considered.

https://www.treehugger.com/spacex-launch-puts-out-much-co-fl...

Difference being the per person emissions. 4 people, vs upwards for 250. But still not nearly as bad as I thought it might be.

per capita, sure. Another way to think about it is this capsule is flying what, twice a year? One 777 will do 2 trips in 24 hrs, 365 days a year. Then add up the thousands of planes doing that a day. I'd be worried if we ALL had a reason (and the means) to take frivolous space flights. Which may come some day out of all this, who knows anymore!?!

Yea that is surprisingly low, if accurate.

I mean, they're both 200 foot long tubes full of fuel that gets used up by the end of the flight. Only so much carbon you can fit into a set volume.

Agreed, though without considering it as such if someone asked me to compare to an airliner I would have placed it between 10-100x the emissions, and would not have been surprised at more!

Remember 3/4 of the rocket is just the oxygen for combustion!

About 8.4 car seconds of fuel.

Data: Us burns about 390,000,000 gallons of gas per day.

SpaceX Falcon9 uses about 38,000 gallons of RP-1.

390000000/86400 = 4513 (gallons per second of fuel in the US).

38,000/4500 = 8.4 seconds.

On the day this launches, it will represent about 0.0097% of the fuel used for that day in the US.

There are about 280 cars in this photo: https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/ibimg/hgm/450x253-1/100/226/parking-...

If you printed out this image 40 times, you could delete ONE car from this image for one day. That's the difference that this launch will make.

This caused me to look up largest parking lots. You can fit approximately that many cars in the parking lots at Disney in Florida on any given day (11k+ spots). Though I don't know how full they actually get.