14 ms·

One thing that human space exploration/settlement teaches us more than anything is how to do everything without net carbon emissions. Solar power? Nuclear power

One thing that human space exploration/settlement teaches us more than anything is how to do everything without net carbon emissions. Solar power? Nuclear power? Both essential to and pioneered in part by space exploration. Same for fuel cell tech. On the International Space Station, CO2 is sucked from the cabin air, combined with hydrogen (produced as a byproduct of producing oxygen by splitting water, much of which was recycled from the air and waste water and urine) to make methane and more water. ISS also is getting a plastic recycling machine that will be used to 3D print replacement parts from plastic waste and old parts. Human spaceflight is like the Sustainability Olympics.

makapuf 8y ago
Right, some nice inventions are due to space race but just after two giant boosters worth of propergol were burnt. And making those things that go to space are not completely carbon neutral either.
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  The highest performing rocket propellants in common use are hydrogen and oxygen, whose product is water. And NASA and others are working on ways to refuel those using just electricity and water.
  - trashtester 8y ago
    The coal used by most countries for producing electricity is not that clean though. If anyone is really serious about global warming, shutting down coal plants should be priority 1, natural gas plants priority 2 and transportation emissions priority 3.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Fortunately we can work in parallel. Switching anything from burning whatever it's burning to electricity is a huge win, because electricity sources can be changed independently of electricity consumers. Today's electric cars powered by coal are tomorrow's electric cars powered by solar, wind and nuclear, with no involvement of the car owners required.
    - Robotbeat 8y ago
      Transportation is really #2 after coal. Transportation is responsible for the majority of emissions in the US, and although an EV running on coal is basically just breaking even for GHG emissions, an EV running on natural gas is a signficant net-win for GHG emissions. In the US using the average electricity mix, an EV like the Model 3 emits a factor of 2.5x less GHG than an equivalent diesel vehicle. Because 40% of electricity is from clean sources (nuclear, wind, hydro, solar, geothermal), and coal is just 27% now.
      - trashtester 8y ago
        I put natural gas as #2 mostly as a hedge against just replacing coal with NG. As for moving transportation to electrical propulsion, the real effect has to be judged by the marginal effect it has on emissions. If the marginal change is covered by coal, the benefit is much smaller than if the marginal change is covered by clean sources.
  - Tuna-Fish 8y ago
    > The highest performing rocket propellants in common use are hydrogen and oxygen, whose product is water. Citation needed. Hydrolox has the highest Isp, but for a boost stage, that alone at all costs is not the most important quality. Hydrolox engines, tanks and piping all needs to be much larger and heavier than other fuels, and in practice, this eats the gains that the higher Isp buys you and more. It's not an accident that basically all the new engine designs, by multiple different companies, have tested hydrolox and then switched to methalox.
    - Robotbeat 8y ago
      Oh, that is a valid point. Dry mass is just as important as exhaust velocity (Isp). However, I should point out that it's easier to make progress in improving dry mass than it is to improve Isp, so as materials and structural technology improves, hydrolox continues to look better. Additionally: operating oxygen-rich causes the bulk density of hydrolox to improve dramatically. This is relevant for first stages, and if reusable launch vehicles become so cheap that propellant cost becomes a major constraint, then I should point out that liquid oxygen is practically free: less than $100 per ton. For first stages, you're right (unless you get clever and are able to solve the engineering challenges of running oxygen-rich). For upper stages, hydrolox again looks very attractive (because a first-order optimization shows that it's energetically favorable to use higher Isp on the upper stage than the lower stage if you need to make a choice... of course, commonality of stages is also desirable at lower flight rates).
      - Tuna-Fish 8y ago
        > so as materials and structural technology improves, hydrolox continues to look better. The opposite is true. The relevant problem of hydrogen is that it readily leaks through thin walls. This means that as methalox rockets move to ever thinner composite tanks made of better materials, hydrolox really cannot do better than the current state of the art. > operating oxygen-rich causes the bulk density of hydrolox to improve dramatically. True. But it also makes your exhaust into a hot, oxidizing torch, meaning you need much more durable (and heavier!) engine bells. > For upper stages, hydrolox again looks very attractive The other problem is that it must be cooled much deeper, and takes much less energy to boil off, making long term storage a hard problem. This makes hydrolox less interesting for any upper stages/manouvering engines that do anything more complex than deliver cargo to earth orbit. Once you add long coast times, it gets really bad -- to the point that the SLS moon missions actually get lower efficiency from their upper stages than they would get from kerolox, once you account for the extra hydrogen they have to ferry up just to let it boil away. > commonality of stages is also desirable at lower flight rates Commonality of stages is desirable at all flight rates. Paying for the highest possible efficiency gadget for every task is one of the reasons old space has such huge problems competing in cost with the new entries. Just having a little more thrust and burning a little more fuel is more cost-efficient than having another engine manufacturing line. Methalox engines will probably power almost everything newly designed going forward. Not because they are the best solution for anything, but because they are 90% there at everything, while lacking the worst problems of everything. Their fuel is easy to contain and stable for long-term storage, they have no carbon build up in the exhaust, their exhaust is reasonably cool and not heavily corroding, and they have enough thrust and enough of Isp that these advantages will outweigh a minor efficiency loss in almost all situations. The winds of the industry have shifted, and now that methane has been proven, no new hydrolox engines are being developed, with basically everyone choosing methalox for new designs instead. JSC Kuznetsov, SpaceX, BO, ESA and Landspace all independently made the same choice. Others have chosen to use engines developed by some of them. The end result is that the only major rocket operators still developing a future rocket with non-methalox engines are: - Roscosmos (The Angara rocket family development was started before methalox was seen as viable. There are future plans for switching propellants, but afaik no funding for them currently.) - Arianespace (The Ariane 6 development was started before methalox was proven. Ariane NEXT is going to run on methane.) - NASA (SLS was mandated to use existing engine designs by the senate, because the senators' home states needed the money.)
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Rockets seem like giant greenhouse gas emitters because they burn a lot of fuel in a short time. But it turns out, they're actually comparable with airplanes. Random googling gives following two figures to compare: "A jumbo jet (Boeing 747-400) flying from London to New York burns approximately 70,000 kilograms of fuel"[0] Falcon 9 Full Thrust - Takeoff mass (tonnes) 549, Payload to LEO (kg) (from Cape Canaveral) 22,800 (expendable)[1] So, roughly 70 metric tons of fuel for a London->New York flight, vs. 500 metric tons for a LEO launch. It's quite comparable. Now consider that there's five orders of magnitude more flights than there's rocket launches[2]. Even if you take an order of magnitude off that to account for most flights being shorter than LHR->JFK, you still end up with space launches barely registering. And then some rocket fuels are non-carbon-emitting. -- [0] - https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/ask-a-captain/how-much-fuel-does-a-jumbo-jet-burn/ https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/ask-a-captain/how-much-fuel... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Performance [2] - https://garfors.com/2014/06/100000-flights-day-html/ https://garfors.com/2014/06/100000-flights-day-html/ says > 100k flights per day, and there's less than 1 space launch per day.
  - KnightOfWords 8y ago
    A few things to bear in mind here. The payload of a rocket is far less of that of a 747, so you aren't remotely comparing like-with-like. Unlike planes rockets aren't typically reused, the energy cost of manufacturing is considerable. (SpaceX's reusable first stages are impressive, but there is a fuel and payload cost.) Finally, taking a flight is about the highest carbon-emitting activity we do - one transatlantic trip is roughly equivalent to driving a car for a year.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Agreed. Thank you for adding this, to paint a fuller picture. Space industry definitely isn't emissions-free, but right now it doesn't even register. We might have a problem in the future, but there's hope in switching to cleaner fuels planetside and eventually sourcing fuel for space operations from space. As it is today, in my opinion space industry has very good value proposition in terms of utility/carbon emitted.
- amelius 8y ago
  Fortunately, we don't really need to launch any rockets to use these technologies on Earth.
pjc50 8y ago
Nuclear power is primarily a byproduct of nuclear weapons - that's why virtually all reactors use a Uranium -> Plutonium cycle. The only space influence was radiothermal generators, which are a bit niche.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  > The only space influence was radiothermal generators, which are a bit niche. These are/were used to power things like lighthouses and radio relays in sparsely populated areas.
  - folkrav 8y ago
    If that's not a definition of "niche", I don't know what is.
    - blattimwind 8y ago
      Niche yes, but also quite an advancement at the time. You can have many more lighthouses and relays if you don't need to supply diesel every few weeks and have an engineer repair engines.
amelius 8y ago
Yes, we need to get the incentives in place to get this going on Earth. That's the main challenge.
tgb 8y ago
Aren't CO2 scrubbers chemically based in ways that would never scale? Like the real Olympics, running marathons is a fairly inefficient way to transport people. P
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  You'd expect a device built for a space station to scale on the ground? The basic fundamental research is there, that's the main benefit of NASA and publicly funded space exploration. Their innovations may or may not scale, that's up to entrepeneurs who try to figure out a way to scale them.
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  NASA is regularly funding concepts for improved efficiency CO2 scrubbers, some of which ARE scalable. It'd be most useful for fuel production.
vectorEQ 8y ago
counter points: if you put all the space program innovation and money to sustainability, there would be not problems on that area anymore already... the technologies they have brought us could have been invented at only a fraction of the cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA nuclear power was not at all pioneered by the space exploration... it was pioneered by people trying to destroy other humans. the first nuclear reactor was not for power electrically, but to breed plutonium for bombs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power human spaceflight is a void where intelligence and resources disappear into
- Fjolsvith 8y ago
  Kennedy was a visionary, like Musk. Without someone like them to push society, we'd still be waiting for those technologies. Nuclear power was pioneered by people trying to defend their sovereignty. Human spaceflight will pay dividends in the long run. Short sightedness will never result in profit or improvement.
- vvillena 8y ago
  Spaceflight is wasteful because it is designed to be. The same military purposes you talk about is what causes companies like ULA to exist. The space shuttle ended up being an industrial jobs program that resulted in huge costs for every launch. On the other side, NASA is nowadays quite efficient with their money. And companies like SpaceX showed how costs can be tremendously decreased.
agumonkey 8y ago
I joked recently that NASA should start selling closed-loop systems for consumers..

makapuf 8y ago

Right, some nice inventions are due to space race but just after two giant boosters worth of propergol were burnt. And making those things that go to space are not completely carbon neutral either.

Robotbeat 8y ago
The highest performing rocket propellants in common use are hydrogen and oxygen, whose product is water. And NASA and others are working on ways to refuel those using just electricity and water.
- trashtester 8y ago
  The coal used by most countries for producing electricity is not that clean though. If anyone is really serious about global warming, shutting down coal plants should be priority 1, natural gas plants priority 2 and transportation emissions priority 3.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Fortunately we can work in parallel. Switching anything from burning whatever it's burning to electricity is a huge win, because electricity sources can be changed independently of electricity consumers. Today's electric cars powered by coal are tomorrow's electric cars powered by solar, wind and nuclear, with no involvement of the car owners required.
  - Robotbeat 8y ago
    Transportation is really #2 after coal. Transportation is responsible for the majority of emissions in the US, and although an EV running on coal is basically just breaking even for GHG emissions, an EV running on natural gas is a signficant net-win for GHG emissions. In the US using the average electricity mix, an EV like the Model 3 emits a factor of 2.5x less GHG than an equivalent diesel vehicle. Because 40% of electricity is from clean sources (nuclear, wind, hydro, solar, geothermal), and coal is just 27% now.
    - trashtester 8y ago
      I put natural gas as #2 mostly as a hedge against just replacing coal with NG. As for moving transportation to electrical propulsion, the real effect has to be judged by the marginal effect it has on emissions. If the marginal change is covered by coal, the benefit is much smaller than if the marginal change is covered by clean sources.
- Tuna-Fish 8y ago
  > The highest performing rocket propellants in common use are hydrogen and oxygen, whose product is water. Citation needed. Hydrolox has the highest Isp, but for a boost stage, that alone at all costs is not the most important quality. Hydrolox engines, tanks and piping all needs to be much larger and heavier than other fuels, and in practice, this eats the gains that the higher Isp buys you and more. It's not an accident that basically all the new engine designs, by multiple different companies, have tested hydrolox and then switched to methalox.
  - Robotbeat 8y ago
    Oh, that is a valid point. Dry mass is just as important as exhaust velocity (Isp). However, I should point out that it's easier to make progress in improving dry mass than it is to improve Isp, so as materials and structural technology improves, hydrolox continues to look better. Additionally: operating oxygen-rich causes the bulk density of hydrolox to improve dramatically. This is relevant for first stages, and if reusable launch vehicles become so cheap that propellant cost becomes a major constraint, then I should point out that liquid oxygen is practically free: less than $100 per ton. For first stages, you're right (unless you get clever and are able to solve the engineering challenges of running oxygen-rich). For upper stages, hydrolox again looks very attractive (because a first-order optimization shows that it's energetically favorable to use higher Isp on the upper stage than the lower stage if you need to make a choice... of course, commonality of stages is also desirable at lower flight rates).
    - Tuna-Fish 8y ago
      > so as materials and structural technology improves, hydrolox continues to look better. The opposite is true. The relevant problem of hydrogen is that it readily leaks through thin walls. This means that as methalox rockets move to ever thinner composite tanks made of better materials, hydrolox really cannot do better than the current state of the art. > operating oxygen-rich causes the bulk density of hydrolox to improve dramatically. True. But it also makes your exhaust into a hot, oxidizing torch, meaning you need much more durable (and heavier!) engine bells. > For upper stages, hydrolox again looks very attractive The other problem is that it must be cooled much deeper, and takes much less energy to boil off, making long term storage a hard problem. This makes hydrolox less interesting for any upper stages/manouvering engines that do anything more complex than deliver cargo to earth orbit. Once you add long coast times, it gets really bad -- to the point that the SLS moon missions actually get lower efficiency from their upper stages than they would get from kerolox, once you account for the extra hydrogen they have to ferry up just to let it boil away. > commonality of stages is also desirable at lower flight rates Commonality of stages is desirable at all flight rates. Paying for the highest possible efficiency gadget for every task is one of the reasons old space has such huge problems competing in cost with the new entries. Just having a little more thrust and burning a little more fuel is more cost-efficient than having another engine manufacturing line. Methalox engines will probably power almost everything newly designed going forward. Not because they are the best solution for anything, but because they are 90% there at everything, while lacking the worst problems of everything. Their fuel is easy to contain and stable for long-term storage, they have no carbon build up in the exhaust, their exhaust is reasonably cool and not heavily corroding, and they have enough thrust and enough of Isp that these advantages will outweigh a minor efficiency loss in almost all situations. The winds of the industry have shifted, and now that methane has been proven, no new hydrolox engines are being developed, with basically everyone choosing methalox for new designs instead. JSC Kuznetsov, SpaceX, BO, ESA and Landspace all independently made the same choice. Others have chosen to use engines developed by some of them. The end result is that the only major rocket operators still developing a future rocket with non-methalox engines are: - Roscosmos (The Angara rocket family development was started before methalox was seen as viable. There are future plans for switching propellants, but afaik no funding for them currently.) - Arianespace (The Ariane 6 development was started before methalox was proven. Ariane NEXT is going to run on methane.) - NASA (SLS was mandated to use existing engine designs by the senate, because the senators' home states needed the money.)
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Rockets seem like giant greenhouse gas emitters because they burn a lot of fuel in a short time. But it turns out, they're actually comparable with airplanes. Random googling gives following two figures to compare: "A jumbo jet (Boeing 747-400) flying from London to New York burns approximately 70,000 kilograms of fuel"[0] Falcon 9 Full Thrust - Takeoff mass (tonnes) 549, Payload to LEO (kg) (from Cape Canaveral) 22,800 (expendable)[1] So, roughly 70 metric tons of fuel for a London->New York flight, vs. 500 metric tons for a LEO launch. It's quite comparable. Now consider that there's five orders of magnitude more flights than there's rocket launches[2]. Even if you take an order of magnitude off that to account for most flights being shorter than LHR->JFK, you still end up with space launches barely registering. And then some rocket fuels are non-carbon-emitting. -- [0] - https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/ask-a-captain/how-much-fuel-does-a-jumbo-jet-burn/ https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/ask-a-captain/how-much-fuel... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Performance [2] - https://garfors.com/2014/06/100000-flights-day-html/ https://garfors.com/2014/06/100000-flights-day-html/ says > 100k flights per day, and there's less than 1 space launch per day.
- KnightOfWords 8y ago
  A few things to bear in mind here. The payload of a rocket is far less of that of a 747, so you aren't remotely comparing like-with-like. Unlike planes rockets aren't typically reused, the energy cost of manufacturing is considerable. (SpaceX's reusable first stages are impressive, but there is a fuel and payload cost.) Finally, taking a flight is about the highest carbon-emitting activity we do - one transatlantic trip is roughly equivalent to driving a car for a year.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Agreed. Thank you for adding this, to paint a fuller picture. Space industry definitely isn't emissions-free, but right now it doesn't even register. We might have a problem in the future, but there's hope in switching to cleaner fuels planetside and eventually sourcing fuel for space operations from space. As it is today, in my opinion space industry has very good value proposition in terms of utility/carbon emitted.
amelius 8y ago
Fortunately, we don't really need to launch any rockets to use these technologies on Earth.

pjc50 8y ago

Nuclear power is primarily a byproduct of nuclear weapons - that's why virtually all reactors use a Uranium -> Plutonium cycle. The only space influence was radiothermal generators, which are a bit niche.

blattimwind 8y ago
> The only space influence was radiothermal generators, which are a bit niche. These are/were used to power things like lighthouses and radio relays in sparsely populated areas.
- folkrav 8y ago
  If that's not a definition of "niche", I don't know what is.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    Niche yes, but also quite an advancement at the time. You can have many more lighthouses and relays if you don't need to supply diesel every few weeks and have an engineer repair engines.

amelius 8y ago

Yes, we need to get the incentives in place to get this going on Earth. That's the main challenge.

tgb 8y ago

Aren't CO2 scrubbers chemically based in ways that would never scale? Like the real Olympics, running marathons is a fairly inefficient way to transport people. P

WhompingWindows 8y ago
You'd expect a device built for a space station to scale on the ground? The basic fundamental research is there, that's the main benefit of NASA and publicly funded space exploration. Their innovations may or may not scale, that's up to entrepeneurs who try to figure out a way to scale them.
Robotbeat 8y ago
NASA is regularly funding concepts for improved efficiency CO2 scrubbers, some of which ARE scalable. It'd be most useful for fuel production.

vectorEQ 8y ago

counter points: if you put all the space program innovation and money to sustainability, there would be not problems on that area anymore already... the technologies they have brought us could have been invented at only a fraction of the cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA nuclear power was not at all pioneered by the space exploration... it was pioneered by people trying to destroy other humans. the first nuclear reactor was not for power electrically, but to breed plutonium for bombs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power human spaceflight is a void where intelligence and resources disappear into

Fjolsvith 8y ago
Kennedy was a visionary, like Musk. Without someone like them to push society, we'd still be waiting for those technologies. Nuclear power was pioneered by people trying to defend their sovereignty. Human spaceflight will pay dividends in the long run. Short sightedness will never result in profit or improvement.
vvillena 8y ago
Spaceflight is wasteful because it is designed to be. The same military purposes you talk about is what causes companies like ULA to exist. The space shuttle ended up being an industrial jobs program that resulted in huge costs for every launch. On the other side, NASA is nowadays quite efficient with their money. And companies like SpaceX showed how costs can be tremendously decreased.

agumonkey 8y ago

I joked recently that NASA should start selling closed-loop systems for consumers..