With more spaceships launching than before, engineers are looking for alternative rocket fuels that leave less gunk in the air.
midsummer morning 54 miles northwest of Santa Barbara, California, SpaceX engineers hustled through a ritual they’d been through before. They loaded a Falcon 9 rocket with tens of thousands of gallons of kerosene and supercold liquid oxygen, a propellant combo that brought the craft’s nine Merlin engines roaring to life with 1.7 million pounds of thrust. Soon after, the machine shot through the stratosphere, ready to dispatch 46 of the company’s Starlink internet satellites into low Earth orbit.
The increasing frequency of launches has researchers like Martin N. Ross, an atmospheric physicist and project engineer at the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit research center in California, worried about the—and the world. Predictions for rocket traffic in the coming decades point dramatically up, like a Falcon 9 on a pad.
SpaceX’s Ax-1 mission, the first all-private flight to the ISS, used a Falcon 9 rocket powered by liquid oxygen and RP-1 kerosene.In the 1980s, British meteorologists revealed that the ozone layer in the Antarctic stratosphere was thinning. They identified the culprit as chlorine from aerosol spray cans and to O3-munching chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons from other human-made sources.
, a jet bomber able to fly 11 miles high and retrofitted for scientific observations, teams directly sampled emissions from American launch vehicles including Titan, Athena, and Delta into the early 2000s. CH4 naturally occurs when wetland bacteria decompose matter. It’s a relatively new choice for rocket fuel, and it debuted in 2007 with a successful NASA engine test. Burning methane creates about 10 percent more specific impulse—the rocket equivalent of gas mileage—than kerosene.
Sensing an aerospace trend, Ross, Toohey, and their colleague Michael Mills calculated what emissions would be produced by a fleet of similarly hydrocarbon-powered rockets anywhere between the Earth’s surface and 90 miles aloft. Their predictions, which they published in 2010 in the journalturned up something unexpected: an emissions signature full of black carbon, the same contaminant belched by poorly tuned diesel engines on the ground.
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