(Edited my comment from initially having a more polarizing tone.)

"Black carbon": starship uses methane, very little black carbon produced.

5000 tons of aluminum in the atmosphere is trivial compared to meteorite dust.

Yet here we are

I'm absolutely, completely, utterly sure someone said this about the first fossil fuel technologies. "Oh, I'm sure this 'pollution' thing will be solved."

With Starlink - offering cheap and high-speed internet access to currently underserved places is absolutely good and important, maybe even critical for long-term success and stability of some regions. It's not clear that this is the best way to do that. Kessler syndrome, light pollution, potential upper-atmosphere effects (ozone depletion), should not just be waved away. It's just more externalities piling up. Rich countries should be subsidizing these underserved areas around the world so they can put in infrastructure - cell stations, fiber lines, etc. - rather than filling up the sky.

Most riches we experience in this modern life... depended utterly on the energy credits we spent by burning the eons-old reservoirs of solar energy, of dead plants and animals.

Honestly not sure it's a win. Maybe they had less, but they had not destroyed most trees, mammals and insects (which we have already), and all that for what? For a future where we will most likely have much, much less energy, and therefore where most our modern system... will collapse.

* Rocket launches are a rounding error on co2 emissions when compared to passenger aircraft

* the worries about Kessler syndrome whilst simultaneously worrying about tonnes of aluminum and rare earth minerals (gasp) due to the short orbital lifetime of the satellites are contradictory.

* Presumably astronomers are more worried about light pollution rather than ecological concerns

On a side note, what is it about people hyping up rare earth materials? The twitter thread tries to make them sound scary. Others try to make them sound harder to find than gold.

https://www.economist.com/international/2021/11/25/vast-sate...

https://www.economist.com/img/b/640/356/90/sites/default/fil...

> co2 emissions

Good thing rockets only release co2 and not a long list of very nasty things

Also good thing they stay at low altitude and don't go through every layers of the atmosphere while releasing said nasty things

I'm no rocket engineer but your comment is extremely naive

Since we're specifically talking about SpaceX and Starlink, let's talk about Falcon and StarShip rockets. Let's look at the "long list of very nasty things".

Falcon 9 is expecting to launch a record number of flights this year, recent reports suggesting 52. Falcon 9 burns RP1 (a refined kerosene, very similar to jet fuel), a hydrocarbon that mostly produces CO2 when burnt, but also Carbon monoxide, and plain old carbon. The Falcon 9 has about 200k litres of fuel when fully loaded. It sounds like a lot, but for perspective a fully loaded Airbus A380 has a fuel capacity of 380k litres. So, they output of a record breaking year will be the equivalent of around 25 long distance flights of a large passenger aircraft. I'm not going to find out how many long distance large plan flights are happening, but many estimates are over 100k a day. So a record breaking year outputs a fraction of a percentage that airline flights do each hour. And the "nasty" stuff is mostly CO2, CO, and C.

Starship will burn Methane, and will burn even cleaner than Falcon 9. It will also be fully reusable, resulting in less waste again. On the downside, methane is a potent greenhouse gas, so any unburt fuel would be not great. That said, rockets are designed to make the most efficient of fuel, and any unburt fuel is not going to be released in normal operation.

> I'm no rocket engineer

Colour me shocked!

As for going through "every layer" of the atmosphere, I wouldn't get too worried about that. A lot of a rocket's fuel is burnt at lower altitudes (the same level at which passenger and military Jets operate) and the various zone mix readily, and are really so massive that you would have trouble measuring the impact of hundreds to thousands of flights of Starship per year.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13082/calculate-fa...

https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/what-is-the-environmental... https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/what-is-the-environmental...

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/32002/what-percent...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220517112210.h...

Anyways, "just one more car", "just one more plane", "just one more coal plant", "just want more launch", "it's not that much worse, just a tiny bit"

https://sdup.esoc.esa.int/discosweb/statistics/static/PLtraf...

https://www.eesi.org/images/content/World_Passenger_Traffic_...

> When it comes to greenhouse gasses alone, the contribution of rocket launches is rather negligible, accounting for only 1% of aviation's carbon footprint — which in itself only amounts to 2.4% of annual global carbon emissions, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute

Apart from the fact they overinflated the impact to 1% (there is no way it is close to 1%) there is a reason they chose the adjective "negligible" to describe the impact.

> Eventually, the circulation of the atmosphere dissipates those greenhouse gases and brings the concentrations back to "standard" levels. It is, however, unknown how long the concentrations remain elevated and what their impact on the temperature of the mesosphere could be.

Reality is that these scientists did a simulation, got some results that can be made to sound alarming, but just don't know if these is any inpact. I'm all for studying this more to see if there is a real issue. My gut says it's not going to be a problem until we have at least a couplr of orders of magnitude increase in launches, but it's worth looking at it further.

And I'm not sure why you included the graph of objects in orbit? This looks exciting, but it really is just that companies are now launching clusters of smaller satellites. The good news is that these tend to deorbit in under ten years. Unlike practices of old, this new style of satellite will not result in long lasting space junk.

Finally, what is the point of including a graph of airline flights over time? What bearing does it have on rocket launches?

And, any theorized environmental impact has to be compared to the existing natural process of space dust falling into the atmosphere, and measured against the saved costs worldwide of wires and cell towers and travel not needed, especially as capacity increases in the future. Which is practically impossible to measure, but failing to account for difficult-to-measure costs is a classic error people make when evaluating things like this. And of course there's the extra benefits of coverage over oceans and poles and to ships and planes that you can't get any other way.

Just like 5G could potentially reduce the overall consumption, before we realize that actually we use it to the point where it increases them.

Or just like any other technology, after all.

If you aren't launching every week, then the costs of those staff start to dominate, and the staff aren't paid less if you launch fewer rockets.

And he makes it quite clear with 'Not interest in discussion'. His mind is made up from when he was at google and that's it.

The industry isn't the same as it was then and it was mostly economical that google didn't do the project.

The ecological isn't really bad, its mostly that rocket launches produce CO2, but for a global infrastructure project it isn't actually that much. Everything else isn't really that relevant.

Satellite breaks down or runs out of propellant? Send up a repair/refuel/reentry vehicle.

Astronomers upset about light pollution? Launch a space telescope for them for free, and eliminate that pesky atmosphere for them too.

The mental image this is meant to evoke is that if one crab attempts to escape the bucket by climbing the side, then others will grab it, and their weight will pull it back down. So no crab escapes the bucket.

A metaphor for unconstructive criticism or obstruction that squashes attempts at betterment.

If it needs explaining I meant this guy is worried about a few 1000 tons of space debris versus the certain eventual end of the species if we don’t become spacefaring.

What about we start by not destructing our planet? "No no but look: we destroyed most life on a whole planet, but it will be different in a spaceship: there we will live happily in peace forever, without any problem we can't handle (because we destroyed them with our habitat)"

No one wants the bad thing to happen, but instead they are saying "wouldn't it be smart to have redundancy". They're also not saying "ignore trying to save the environment because we have mars". It is very likely any effort to make mars into a habitable planet would dwarf fixing problems here on earth.

They're also not suggesting spending a significant amount of our resources on Mars, to the detriment of life here on earth.

I am of those who believe that if technology is a big part of the problem, then more of it won't make it better. But it's not like I have a choice, so instead of waiting for a potential asteroid that will kill me while some (rich US citizen, maybe?) survive on Mars, I am here waiting for the catastrophes we are creating.

It’s only good for emergencies.

And anyway it was mostly just a publicity stunt, announcing non existing feature (no satellites in orbit are able to do it) to preempt Apple by few days, and them rolling out working product this year.