Seminar

Abstract

Emissions from the space industry are generally thought to be insignificant. After all, rocket CO2 emissions are small (0.02% of aviation) and growth has historically been slow. Climate and ozone assessment models have thus been able to account for large uncertainties in spaceflight emissions by only bounding global impacts. However, this approach is unlikely to be acceptable in the future because the space industry is in the midst of a paradigm shift to new and much larger rockets, accelerating launch rates, and increased use of destructive reentry to control the growing space debris problem. Spaceflight's stratospheric aerosol emissions, none of which are well understood, could reach 20 Gg per year as soon as 2050 and so become a factor in Earth's radiation budget. Increasing discussions to regulate (or purposefully create) stratospheric aerosols suggest that future launch and reentry emissions could become entangled with such efforts. Rocket launch emissions above 80 km (about 25% of the total) cause transient perturbations in thermosphere composition that could accumulate into global space weather impacts. In this talk, we discuss space industry technologies, expected growth in spaceflight emissions, and their future impacts on the atmosphere. We review the uncertain relationship between geoengineering experiments and spaceflight emissions and present a plan of models and measurements that would close the most critical knowledge gaps in order to provide policymakers with sufficient information to deal with the coming surge of launch and reentry emissions.

---

Dr. Martin Ross is a Senior Project Engineer with the Commercial Launch Projects at The Aerospace Corporation. He received his PhD in Planetary Physics from UCLA, and then joined The Aerospace Corporation in 1988 to study the environmental impacts of rocket plumes. He also serves as an adjunct professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and is a member of the American Geological Union and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.