Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket tests in Texas are emitting so much methane you can see it from space::So much you can see it from the ISS in space.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Most of the problem stems from just a few kinds of places: natural gas wells and pipelines, cattle feedlots, coal mines, rice paddies, and landfills.
Such was the case on June 4, when a plume of the gas was detected at the sprawling ranch in West Texas where billionaire Jeff Bezos tests space rockets.
It turns out that Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin LLC, routinely emits the stuff because it’s developing a rocket that runs on liquefied natural gas, which is almost pure methane.
The state air regulator, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, doesn’t impose limits on methane emissions or require disclosure of releases.
Wells and pipelines in the Permian Basin, a huge oilfield near the rocket site, are thought to give off some 2.7 million tons of methane a year.
In a 2019 speech at Blue Origin, he envisioned a future in which dirty industrial activity took place off-world and that our home was “zoned for residential and light industry.” As he tweeted in 2018, “We go to space to save the Earth.”
The original article contains 648 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Let’s not make dirty industrial activity clean, let’s move it off world (destroying another different planet). Because, you know, that’s apparently easier than actually solving the problem.
Remember when William Shatner was nearly moved to tears by the beauty of the world after his experience on Bezos’s rocket? And then Bezos talked about moving production into space.
Remember when William Shatner was nearly moved to tears
Then Bezos proceeded to spray champagne over him while he was trying to make a quick speech.
No, that is literally solving the problem. You can’t make it clean. What exactly would we need to protect out in space or say the moon? The space whales, or moon frogs? You’re protecting nothing but the vacuum of space and some rocks.
We really need to hold corporations accountable for solar radiation. Our star spits out so much radiation that it can cause a significant increase in skin cancers. This is a proven fact that we’ve known for a long time, yet no one does anything about it. Why? Well, why don’t you look at who the sun really benefits. Corporations, that’s who. Many of our inventions were created to protect us from the sun, reduce its effects or power the things that do. They profit off our misery while neglecting to solve the base issue: that the sun is a dirty fusion ball that threatens our well-being. Take a stand against dirty solar and let’s hold big agriculture, big solar, big a/c and big beach accountable for their role in climate change and proliferation of skin cancers! We can do this together, but only if we stand together and force them to switch to clean solar energy today!
Edit: don’t even get me started on that ring of trash around Saturn. Seriously, stop allowing corpos to profit off the pollution of our stellar environment.
Edit 2: yo, this was supposed to be a joke about how I think complaining about pollution on the Moon or whatever is silly. Maybe it’s not a good one, but yeah.
Didn’t we originally think the same (“you’re protecting nothing”) when it came to the ocean, the Rain Forests, lakes, streams, the Arctic, etc? Until we learned otherwise. By that time, the profit motive was too entrenched to ever allow things to change.
By way of example, what if the moon were mined to such an extreme that it changed its orbit? Wouldn’t that impact it or the earth itself? What if the moon were no longer there at all because that suited a future trillionaire’s aim to add another billion to their bank account?
No, the environmental movement has been happening since the industrial revolution caused air pollution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_movement
Mining the moon for rocket fuel won’t affect its orbit, and I’m not sure how a trillionaire could remove the moon
I must have an overactive imagination because I can think of plenty of problems that unregulated space industry could cause.
Industry requires infrastructure and support, when speaking space terms everything is way more expensive so cost cutting will be rampant on all systems. Centralized space communication hub? No, we’re gonna be bombarded with signals since maintaining the equipment on ground is cheaper (astrology sciences would suffer). Way to many objects in an orbital plane? Not their problem till eventually it becomes a catastrophic event as our own planet can become (Kessler Syndrome). More mass requires more fuel? Dump all the junk at every opportunity clogging space lanes (micro meteors and radiation will no longer be the main safety concern for travel).
I could go on and on, think about the current state of shipping and logistics. We already have events where ships were forced to sit for weeks outside of docks waiting to be unloaded (source). The space faring ships will only increase in size. What do you do with the useless containers they ship the contents back to earth with? The cost would be too high for re-usability getting it back into space. What about the workers who are at an unregulated site and their conditions?
I agree it’s a conundrum of how do we advance when advancement causes destruction. It’s something I’ve wrestled with when considering the Fermi paradox. Either you live harmoniously with the planet and die when it’s environment changes, or you use that sucker up and get out of dodge before the next mass extinction takes you and nearly all of the living creatures out. I’m hoping in the future we meet some neighbors that can show a middle ground works well to persuade out current trajectory.
Honestly? You can’t collapse the moon’s ecosystem because the moon doesn’t have an ecosystem.
Yeah, the moon doesn’t have an ecosystem.
It’s important to note that we know for sure that the moon has no ecosystem, because every ecosystem is based on plants/solar irradiation as a source for energy, and therefore it would have to be on the surface.
There’s no “hidden” ecosystems or underground oceans with life in them.
When burned, methane produces water and carbon dioxide, which are less harmful to the environment. The issue here is not with rocket testing, but with improper storage of methane
It’s embarrassing because it sounds that all blue origin had to do was burn the excess methane to mitigate the impact.
I’m sure rockets testing is a issue on its own, especially when we are facing a climate and social crisis and it’s being used for rich people entertainment or for aid authoritarian governments in shipping weapons into orbit
Results of space exploration in everyday life: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/
Return on investment: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/3721375-how-much-does-nasa-return-to-the-american-economy/
Billionaire space folly will attract 100% tax when I am finally in charge.
Eating the billionaires sounds more and more attractive every day.
