The most remarkable collapse of a personal reputation that I can think of in my lifetime. (Bill Cosby comes to mind but with much lower stakes)
Elon Musk’s personal stench having a real effect on his company’s fortunes.
Below, Musk retweeted a plug for his proposed rocket powered mass transit program. What such a world looks like increasingly called into question.
In recent years, the night sky has filled with satellites from rapidly expanding constellations in low Earth orbit, driven by a booming space industry. While this development brings exciting opportunities, it also raises new environmental concerns.
Rocket launches and re-entering space debris release pollutants into the middle atmosphere, where they can damage the ozone layer which protects life on Earth from harmful UV radiation—a growing concern that scientists are only beginning to understand.
Research on the effects of rocket emissions on the ozone layer began over 30 years ago, but for a long time, these effects were considered small. This perception is starting to change as launch activity accelerates. In 2019, there were just 97 orbital space rocket launches globally. By 2024, that number had surged to 258, and is expected to keep rising rapidly.
In the middle and upper atmosphere, emissions from rockets and re-entering space debris can remain up to 100 times longer than emissions from ground-based sources due to the absence of removal processes such as cloud-driven washout. While most launches occur in the Northern Hemisphere, atmospheric circulation spreads these pollutants globally.
To better understand the long-term impact of increasing rocket emissions, we collaborated with an international research team led by Laura Revell from the University of Canterbury. Using a chemistry climate model developed at ETH Zurich and the Physical Meteorological Observatory in Davos (PMOD/WRC) we simulated how projected rocket emissions will affect the ozone layer by 2030. The study is published in the journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.
Assuming a growth scenario with 2,040 annual launches in 2030—about eight times the figure for 2024—global average ozone thickness would decline by almost 0.3%, with seasonal reductions of up to 4% over Antarctica, where the ozone hole still forms each spring.
While these numbers may seem modest at first sight, it’s important to remember that the ozone layer is still recovering from past damage caused by long-lived chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were successfully banned by the Montreal Protocol in 1989. Yet today, the thickness of the global ozone layer is still roughly 2% below pre-industrial levels and is not expected to fully recover until around 2066. Our findings indicate that emissions from rockets—currently unregulated—could delay this recovery by years or decades, depending on rocket industry growth.
Gracious, Elon’s trying again to promote rockets as point-to-point travel? Adam Something on his channel discussed (dismissed) this four years ago. He’s always entertained by Musk’s promotion of things we don’t need as a society.
“Elon Musk’s Starship Earth to Earth: We Have Reached Peak Idiocy”
That was great!
He didn’t even attempt to calculate the cost.
The bad part is designing something with that excessive “rich people need to get there faster” is that the other aspect is being looked at – military supply transport.
https://www.govtech.com/products/u-s-military-hopes-to-one-day-move-supplies-via-spacex
I’m skeptical of the need for the new work going into hypersonic passenger transport, but the thing that strikes me about the concept of using large rockets for military supply is a reusable rocket needs a place to land to unload, so landing them now is great, but “re-use” implies strongly that the rocket lands somewhere where it can either take off again or be transported for re-use. Rockets are big, so can’t be trucked out, and any military urgency would also suggest the rocket is a target when it lands. Takes a lot of fuel to re-launch a rocket, and combat zones, particularly with drones, are now not a place where rocket fuel would be a good thing to ship in and store.