Talk about pollution. How much pollution do we get from rocket launches?

When you talk about major industries around the world that pollute and release carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the air, nobody really talks about the space industry. But there are some issues with the space industry and atmospheric pollution, and not just rockets going up, but space junk coming down. 

According to space.com,
‘The amount of space debris — old satellites and spent rocket stages — falling back to Earth has doubled over the past 10 years. A few hundred tons of old space junk now vaporizes in the atmosphere every year, experts say.’ 

By the end of the decade, these experts are expecting up to 3000 metric tons of space junk to vaporize as it enters our atmosphere and falls to the ground. That's a lot of carbon and vaporized metals floating around in our atmosphere for you to breathe. 

Now let's look at rockets going up. 

Experts are saying that we can expect about 100,000. Satellites and spacecraft to be orbiting the Earth by the end of the decade. How does all that junk get up there? ROCKETS. Most rockets that are in use today are using fossil fuels to get them up into Orbit. (Not so good for the ozone layer.) 

It was just a few years ago that I remember reading a science fiction novel and, in that story, they talked about the US government regulating the number of rocket launches per year in order to mitigate that ozone layer decay. (Just a story, mind you.) 

Could this actually happen? As the number of launches increase and the amount of space junk that falls out of the sky Increases the numbers might make it necessary. 

According to Space.com,
‘A study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in June found that concentrations of aluminum oxides in the mesosphere and stratosphere — the two atmospheric layers above the lowest layer, the troposphere — could increase by 650% in the coming decades due to the rise in reentering space junk.’ 

Right now, this is not a big deal, but in the not-too-distant future it could become significant. 

Now is the time to be concerned about it and plan for the future. 

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