Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome tough Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says burning out
Speaker 1: his views up here alone. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe Mccormickin today, we're gonna be talking about rockets. And
Speaker 1: if you know us and you know this show, you
Speaker 1: know we love rockets. So there is not a chance
Speaker 1: in heck that we are here to bash rockets today.
Speaker 1: But since we sometimes talk about environmental impact on the show,
Speaker 1: and since rockets seem, by their very nature to involve
Speaker 1: an awful lot of burning and emitting of substances, we
Speaker 1: thought it might be worth asking what exactly is the
Speaker 1: environmental impact of a rocket launch and what can we
Speaker 1: do about that impact. Yeah, now, assuming of course that
Speaker 1: the environmental impact would be bad enough that we would
Speaker 1: need to do something. And when you first start looking
Speaker 1: around at the problem, you might think, oh, this isn't
Speaker 1: that big a deal, until you start thinking, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: We're heading to a future where we're really stressing how space.
Speaker 1: Getting into space is getting easier and easier. Things like
Speaker 1: reusable rockets, the private space industry. So this is actually
Speaker 1: something that we should think about now before it does
Speaker 1: become the next huge environmental problem. Right, and we can
Speaker 1: get into more of the details of that later. But Lauren,
Speaker 1: did you say that this was actually a listener request?
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure it was, and I unfortunately didn't write
Speaker 1: down the name of the lovely human who sent it in,
Speaker 1: So I am so sorry, lovely human. Thank you for
Speaker 1: listening and for suggesting, and this is your episode congratulations.
Speaker 1: Now we should also point out that no less an
Speaker 1: authority than Sir Richard Branson tells us we have nothing
Speaker 1: to worry about. Well, whatever he tells us, we'll just
Speaker 1: take that's an objective, biased opinion, very short episode. Not
Speaker 1: it all related to the fact that he is overseeing
Speaker 1: Virgin Galactic space tourism industry. But what does he actually say?
Speaker 1: He actually says, and this this is something that could
Speaker 1: also be true. But you know, you still have to
Speaker 1: think about the implications here that the actual carbon dioxide
Speaker 1: emissions so CEO two, specifically from a rocket launch are less,
Speaker 1: at least for our Virgin Galactic style rocket launch, which
Speaker 1: is a little different from other ones because that would
Speaker 1: use a larger plane that would then launch a spacecraft
Speaker 1: from the plane while the plane is already in air.
Speaker 1: But he says the total CEO two emissions would be
Speaker 1: less than a round trip flight from New York to London,
Speaker 1: normal flight, not space flights. So like, if you were
Speaker 1: to get on a plane and fly to London and
Speaker 1: then party in London for a week, and then get
Speaker 1: back on a plane and fly back to New York,
Speaker 1: the CEO two emissions from those two flights would be
Speaker 1: greater than a virgin galactic rocket flight. Oh, then there's
Speaker 1: no big deal. Let's have all the space launches. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm just going to trade off all those trips to
Speaker 1: London I take with trips to space, and and I'm
Speaker 1: like reducing my carbon footprint right, not so fast, slick, Okay,
Speaker 1: So we should look at what some scientists have actually
Speaker 1: found on the subject of the environmental impact of rocket launches,
Speaker 1: and we should preface this by saying, of course, not
Speaker 1: all rockets are the same. So yeah, yeah, there are
Speaker 1: lots of different combinations of combustants out there, and of
Speaker 1: course they therefore all produce different emissions in different quantities.
Speaker 1: And so rather than like go through each type exhaustively,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about some of the wide ranging
Speaker 1: effects that are seen. Right, you have to go through
Speaker 1: every type of solid fuel, liquid fuel rocket, it would
Speaker 1: it would be in its own series, and that would
Speaker 1: get really really tedious, chemically tedious after a short while. Though,
Speaker 1: then again, think of the pluses. I mean, just think
Speaker 1: about how much we love trying to pronounce really long
Speaker 1: names of chemicals. I've got one coming up pretty soon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh man, you're in for a treat those lovers of
Speaker 1: tetra flora hydro clocks of blocks of do Yeah, pretty sure.
Speaker 1: That's what Mary Poppins says to make penguins dance for her.
Speaker 1: But go ahead, okay, Well, one of the big ones.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you guys encountered this. It seems to be
Speaker 1: one of the most prevalent objections to the environmental impact
Speaker 1: of rockets is the depletion of stratospheric ozone. So you
Speaker 1: guys remember back in the eighties the chlorofluora carbon's controversy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: aosol cans in particular, uh, were they were a source
Speaker 1: for CFC's or chloro flora carbons, which if they were
Speaker 1: to get into the stratospheric level of the atmosphere could
Speaker 1: end up depleting the ozone layer, creating these holes in
Speaker 1: the ozone layer. And ozone, as I'm sure most of
Speaker 1: you out there are aware, is really important for us
Speaker 1: because it absorbs ultra violet radiation. It decreases the amount
Speaker 1: of UV radiation that we receive here on Earth. Without
Speaker 1: that protective layer, we would be in far greater danger.
Speaker 1: We'd be much greater risk of developing things like skin
Speaker 1: cancer and other types of sun damage. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: rocket engines typically eject gases, and these gases come well,
Speaker 1: not typically rocket engines always, yes, it's part of the gig.
Speaker 1: Maybe not all space flight propellants, but but rocket rocket
Speaker 1: engines ejected gases, and these gases can eject propellants that
Speaker 1: form chemical reactions with molecules of ozone. And that's not
Speaker 1: good because we need those molecules of ozone to be
Speaker 1: not reacted with, to stay how they are, to hang
Speaker 1: out they're more or less unchanged. That would be ideal,
Speaker 1: And of course that is not what's been happening since
Speaker 1: at least the nine seventies when we started looking at it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So there was a two thousand nine article in the
Speaker 1: journal astro Politics the International Journal of Space Politics and Policy,
Speaker 1: which that sounds like a good journal. I've never really
Speaker 1: checked it out before, but I'm sure there's lots of
Speaker 1: good talk about space law in its politics. I'm wondering
Speaker 1: how you would fill a buster in space very quietly
Speaker 1: in space, no one can hear you fill a buster.
Speaker 1: But anyway. The article is called limits on the Space
Speaker 1: launch Market related to Stratospheric ozone Depletion, and the authors
Speaker 1: note that both solid rocket motors or sr M s
Speaker 1: and liquid rocket engines l r E s both produce
Speaker 1: emissions that have been shown to directly deplete global ozone,
Speaker 1: and they calculate that ozone depletion UH is going to
Speaker 1: be a function of payload, launch rate, and relative mix
Speaker 1: of SRM and l r E rocket emission. So it
Speaker 1: depends on what type you're using and what your your
Speaker 1: payload and number of launches are. But at the time
Speaker 1: of publication they estimated that rocket launches depleted the ozone
Speaker 1: layer by about zero point zero three percent per year,
Speaker 1: which at the time they say, okay, that's pretty much negligible,
Speaker 1: but we'll we'll come back to that in a bit. Well,
Speaker 1: let's let's talk about a little a bit more right now,
Speaker 1: because it turns out that uh, that the that direct
Speaker 1: um injection of chemicals that can react with with ozone,
Speaker 1: that's not the only thing we have to worry about
Speaker 1: that could actually affect the ozone layer. Right. Those are
Speaker 1: the reactive gases that react with the ozone layer, but
Speaker 1: they're also you can talk about emissions of particulate matter, right,
Speaker 1: and aluminum oxide and soot are two of those particulates
Speaker 1: that people have started to look at and say, this
Speaker 1: could actually really compound that problem because they are chemically
Speaker 1: reactive surfaces, meaning that the actual particles can be uh
Speaker 1: kind of a home for other chemicals to react with ozone.
Speaker 1: So they're not directly depleting the ozone. Rather, they are
Speaker 1: acting as sort of a a a laboratory of sorts
Speaker 1: for these chemical reactions to happen. It's just these are
Speaker 1: suspended in the air as a result of being ejected
Speaker 1: from the rocket as it's going through the stratosphere. So
Speaker 1: um uh. Specifically, it says here this was from an article.
Speaker 1: As reading, it says, the chemical reactions in question are
Speaker 1: pretty nasty and involved the emission of gas molecules referred
Speaker 1: to as radicals. Uh and that isn't In the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: radical means awesome kind of mean. Um. It's a single
Speaker 1: radical molecule in the strasphere can destroy as many as
Speaker 1: ten thousand ozone molecules. So aluminum oxide and soot provide
Speaker 1: the opportunity for more of this ozone killing stuff to
Speaker 1: get into the stratosphere, and they can. They can also
Speaker 1: in general contribute to climate change. Yeah, and now let's
Speaker 1: talk about aluminum oxide for a second, one of the
Speaker 1: two particulates. One of the things about alluinum oxides, besides
Speaker 1: the fact that it can serve as this are um,
Speaker 1: this launching point for chemical reactions, it's also reflective, so
Speaker 1: it can actually reflect light that is heading towards Earth
Speaker 1: back into space. It can, but it also does absorb
Speaker 1: light on the infrared spectrum. So therefore it seems likely
Speaker 1: that it could contribute to atmospheric warming and therefore to
Speaker 1: climate change in the long run. It's it's one of
Speaker 1: those like more it's it's a bigger question mark than
Speaker 1: the soot issue. The issue is a little bit more,
Speaker 1: uh sure, in terms of it's gonna mess and stuff up.
Speaker 1: I guess we could say it's not all in terms
Speaker 1: of black and silver. Let be the soot aluminium all right, anyway,
Speaker 1: let me talk about soot for a second. So the
Speaker 1: stuff that makes soot black is called black carbon, and
Speaker 1: generally speaking, most scientists say putting black carbon directly into
Speaker 1: the stratosphere is what we would typically say, it is
Speaker 1: a bad thing. You don't want to do it. Uh,
Speaker 1: it doesn't stay in the stratosphere for as long as
Speaker 1: carbon dioxide would. Carbon dioxide can stay up for for decades,
Speaker 1: hundreds of years even, but black carbon would only stay
Speaker 1: up there for maybe five to ten years. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: stay it's it tends to get washed out of the
Speaker 1: lower levels of the atmosphere because precipitation will just knock
Speaker 1: it down the air. But in the stratosphere you don't
Speaker 1: have that to to contend with UM And according to
Speaker 1: Popular Science, they sited to study that said black carbon
Speaker 1: absorbs one hundred thousand times as much energy as carbon
Speaker 1: dioxide emitted by rockets. So that tells you that it's
Speaker 1: it's a power player in the in the potential for
Speaker 1: making a climate change worse. UM. So rockets produce about
Speaker 1: a thousand times more black carbon per unit of fuel
Speaker 1: compared to normal aircraft. Plus rockets are traveling through the stratosphere,
Speaker 1: so it's a direct injection of this stuff into the
Speaker 1: left layer. You absolutely do not want it to go
Speaker 1: into now, according to computer models, so these are simulations.
Speaker 1: Obviously we don't have a ton of data about this,
Speaker 1: but according to computer models, ring shaped cloud of black
Speaker 1: carbon would form around the area of a launch site
Speaker 1: where a rocket has come up. Uh. That cloud of
Speaker 1: black carbon would actually have both a warming and a
Speaker 1: cooling effect. The it would create a shade in a
Speaker 1: certain region that would immediately start to cool it, but
Speaker 1: it would also help trap heat, so would have warming
Speaker 1: in certain areas and cooling and others, and it could
Speaker 1: be pretty dramatic. We're talking of a magnitude of five degrees,
Speaker 1: although I must add popular science and neglected to say
Speaker 1: whether those were celsius or fahrenheit. Wait, should we either
Speaker 1: assume that they're being correct and snobby and just assuming
Speaker 1: celsius or should we assume that they're being slack and
Speaker 1: assuming fahrenheit Joe, It's called popular science, so on worldwide
Speaker 1: standards we can go with seals. But at any rate
Speaker 1: that I mean five degrees is that's enormous. Like it
Speaker 1: sounds like it's nothing, right, especially if you live someplace
Speaker 1: that has a fairly dramatic switch from winter to summer,
Speaker 1: where you've got, you know, a big range of temperatures.
Speaker 1: Five degrees sounds like, oh, well that's nothing. No, it
Speaker 1: is huge. Uh, when most of the climate change models
Speaker 1: we talk about end up being well, this could be
Speaker 1: an increase of maybe one point three degrees, and everyone
Speaker 1: freaks out. This is five degrees. So in it it's
Speaker 1: much shorter term. So it's not like something that would
Speaker 1: last forever. If we got to a point where we
Speaker 1: were seeing these effects, we could say we're gonna put
Speaker 1: the hold on space launches and change things up, because
Speaker 1: if we continue to do this will just keep the problem,
Speaker 1: it will perpetuate it. Right. Also, I should add that
Speaker 1: the model they were using was assuming a thousand launches
Speaker 1: per year, which is an order of magnitude larger than
Speaker 1: what we're seeing right now. It's usually about a hundred
Speaker 1: per year. Yeah, that that would be that would be
Speaker 1: a busy year. A hundred would be a busy year.
Speaker 1: We'll talk more about that in a little bit, but yeah,
Speaker 1: a thousand launches a year is is way more than
Speaker 1: what we do right now. However, remember we're talking about
Speaker 1: a future where space tourism is presumably going to be
Speaker 1: a thing, where we reusable rockets are bringing the cost
Speaker 1: of getting into space down. And once you start removing
Speaker 1: those barriers, then obviously there are a lot of reasons
Speaker 1: to try and get out into space, from science to
Speaker 1: tourism to all sorts of surveillance, all kinds of reasons. Um,
Speaker 1: it's not unreasonable to suspect that in the future we
Speaker 1: would see around a thousand launches a year. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's an enormous amount, but it could happen. In fact,
Speaker 1: one company uh X core x c o R wants
Speaker 1: to ramp up like when they hit full speed. They
Speaker 1: want to be having four launches per day. Now, even
Speaker 1: assuming that that's just work days like business days, and
Speaker 1: removing all the popular holidays. In the United States, this
Speaker 1: year has two hundred fifty of those days. Two fifty
Speaker 1: times four is one thousand. So there you go. There's
Speaker 1: your thousand, um uh And and it's important to keep
Speaker 1: in mind here that the effects on the atmosphere aren't
Speaker 1: the only effects that we're potentially looking at. No, there
Speaker 1: are multiple reasons you might not want to be a
Speaker 1: frog that lives near a launch site. Yeah, I generally
Speaker 1: don't want to be a frog. I have to say.
Speaker 1: I'm mean, I don't know they're they're real cute, but
Speaker 1: I find that a narrow minded lattitude is making me think.
Speaker 1: Wasn't there a picture of a rocket launching with a
Speaker 1: frog hanging off of it like desperately? Yeah, this this
Speaker 1: episode goes out to you are amphibian friend and at
Speaker 1: any rate, but no that there are legitimately documented negative
Speaker 1: environmental effects on the ground surrounding rocket launch site, right,
Speaker 1: which is not a big surprise. You see these these
Speaker 1: rockets taking off. Obviously massive amounts of gas are admitted
Speaker 1: right there at ground level. Most of that, however, is
Speaker 1: not a huge deal for the immediate area. In fact,
Speaker 1: one of the most dangerous chemicals associated with rocket launches
Speaker 1: wasn't really part of a rocket launch at all. It's
Speaker 1: kind of a secondary chemical that was used in order
Speaker 1: to clean rocket engines, especially after tests, So this wasn't
Speaker 1: necessarily for a full launch. It might be a test situation,
Speaker 1: but it would those tests would typic. We take place
Speaker 1: at launch facilities like Kennedy Space Center. So one of
Speaker 1: the byproducts that was particularly dangerous has tri chlora ethylene
Speaker 1: or TCE. I think I got that right on the
Speaker 1: first try. I'll never get it right again, so I'm
Speaker 1: going to stick with t CE at any rate. That
Speaker 1: was used to clean the engines and remove hydrocarbon deposits,
Speaker 1: So it was in order to to clean out an
Speaker 1: engine so that you could use it again if you
Speaker 1: were in a testing phase. But TC, it turns out,
Speaker 1: is a very toxic chemical. It's carcinogenic and worse than that.
Speaker 1: If you put it in the ground, it can bind
Speaker 1: with soil and sand and stay chemically active for a
Speaker 1: really long time. It's possible for it to get into groundwater,
Speaker 1: although not likely because it's actually more dense than water,
Speaker 1: so it tends to sink down. But there are a
Speaker 1: lot of geologic processes that could push it back up
Speaker 1: into uh the atmosphere, where that would really be a problem.
Speaker 1: I should also point out that the places where the
Speaker 1: deposits are people don't draw their water from the groundwater
Speaker 1: in those places, but it's still could have a really
Speaker 1: bad impact on wildlife in the environment. So also water
Speaker 1: doesn't really stay put yeah, yeah, you can't. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, water. Water is like me, baby, It goes
Speaker 1: where it wants to at any rate. So I was
Speaker 1: looking at Joe the whole time of that, and he's
Speaker 1: just just shaking his head. So keep in mind that.
Speaker 1: Uh so before this, when the space race first started,
Speaker 1: right all the way up until after the Apollo thirteen mission,
Speaker 1: there was no such thing as the Environmental Protection Agency
Speaker 1: here in the United States. There was no governing body
Speaker 1: that created the policies and laws that would uh guide
Speaker 1: organizations like I don't know, NASA to dispose of harmful
Speaker 1: chemicals in a responsible way. No, the e P as
Speaker 1: a creature the Nixon administration. That's true. Yeah, Nixon formed
Speaker 1: it in December nineteen seven, and so all the launches
Speaker 1: that happened before that, there was no such governing body.
Speaker 1: So NASA did what made sense. It was cheap. They
Speaker 1: dug a hole and they dumped the TC in it.
Speaker 1: This seems like a good place for this. Oddly enough,
Speaker 1: not such a good place. So yeah, now NASA is
Speaker 1: currently cleaning that soil and has been for quite some time.
Speaker 1: I should shouldn't. It's not like they just started. They've
Speaker 1: been doing it. Year over year. They they're always allotting
Speaker 1: a certain number of millions of dollars toward that effort.
Speaker 1: But from why I understand, we're still looking at some
Speaker 1: decades of cleaning ahead of us. It's not like it's
Speaker 1: going to be um uh taking care of overnight. I mean,
Speaker 1: more than two fifty contaminated sites were identified as being
Speaker 1: places where TC is is found at least in some
Speaker 1: measurable amount. Now, NASA actually strikes me as fairly environmentally
Speaker 1: conscientious as far as government and organizations go, So I
Speaker 1: would imagine they're doing a better job these days. Absolutely. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they have cut way back on using TC. They still
Speaker 1: use it in small amounts, but they also follow very
Speaker 1: strict rules about how to dispose of it. But they're
Speaker 1: using a lot of other alternatives that are chemically they
Speaker 1: react in similar ways to TC, but they don't have
Speaker 1: that carcinogenic factor. They're not toxic the way TC is.
Speaker 1: So so the hope is that future launches will have
Speaker 1: less of an environmentally dangerous effect on the ground around
Speaker 1: the launch site due to these sorts of chemicals. But
Speaker 1: but this is this is a byproduct. Of course, some
Speaker 1: contaminants are released by some launch combustions themselves that affect
Speaker 1: the ground side around the launch. Solid booster rockets, which
Speaker 1: are what the Space Shuttle used for part of their
Speaker 1: launch sequence, combust aluminum and ammonium perclorates and release aluminum particles,
Speaker 1: which which have that effect on the atmosphere is discussed of.
Speaker 1: But they also released hydrochloric acid, like two thirty tons
Speaker 1: of hydrochloric acid per flight. That sounds like a lot.
Speaker 1: It's not a little bit um and you know it's
Speaker 1: it's water soluble, which means that when it does fall
Speaker 1: to the ground, it contaminates the local water supply. NASA
Speaker 1: found reduced numbers of plants species near launch sites partially
Speaker 1: due to this stuff, and it can make bodies of
Speaker 1: water too acidic for fish to survive in. See. This
Speaker 1: makes me think of the again of the eighties because
Speaker 1: acid rain was something that you heard about all the time.
Speaker 1: There is a song that Tim Burton sung about it
Speaker 1: in a fern Gully, The Last Rainforest. Yeah. Actually Tim Curry,
Speaker 1: Tim Curry, Tim Curry, we were talking about Tim Burton
Speaker 1: right before the show. I knew exactly who you're talking about,
Speaker 1: Tim Tim Curry. Tim Curry was the villain of full
Speaker 1: so I assume he was in favor of Acid Raine. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he was pretty excited. Recalled. Just before the song, he
Speaker 1: says something like toxic sludge mother's milk, and then he
Speaker 1: just goes into this song and it only gets creepier
Speaker 1: from there. That was that That was a really good
Speaker 1: impersonation of what was the character's name, Smog. I think
Speaker 1: so my references are all over the place today, Smog.
Speaker 1: That's the dragon from the hop anyway, Okay, I'm fine,
Speaker 1: al right at any rate, So scale here get back. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We talked a little bit already about the fact that
Speaker 1: that in the grand scheme of things, we aren't launching
Speaker 1: that many rockets today. Right, It's not like we're going
Speaker 1: crazy and there's a launch every single day of the week, like,
Speaker 1: not like what people are planning for the future. So
Speaker 1: where are we, like, how many rockets are going up?
Speaker 1: Say a couple of years ago. Well, I found one
Speaker 1: article on space flight now dot com that, if it's correct,
Speaker 1: they said that I had the greatest number of space
Speaker 1: launches of any year since nineteen and that number was two,
Speaker 1: So that's not a whole lot. In they said there
Speaker 1: were eighty one attempted space launches, and as we mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: the different types of emissions and their effects don't necessarily
Speaker 1: compare across the board. But just for a sense of scale,
Speaker 1: let's look at airplanes. I found one blog post that
Speaker 1: crunched some numbers from an industry report compiled by the
Speaker 1: Air Transport Action Group, and it estimated that there were
Speaker 1: a little more than a hundred thousand conventional air flights
Speaker 1: every day around the world. That's a lot, that's a
Speaker 1: hundred about a hundred thousand every day. And if that
Speaker 1: number is correct, even if every rocket launch had the
Speaker 1: impact of ten thousand commercial air flights, our current rate
Speaker 1: of space launches wouldn't come close to rivaling the air
Speaker 1: travel industry. Right, And that's not the only cars heavy
Speaker 1: industry coal burning, So so it is um worth keeping
Speaker 1: scale in mind. Rockets aren't really a big problem today,
Speaker 1: comparatively speaking, it's a it's a drop in the pollution bucket. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but remember this is a future focused podcast, and as
Speaker 1: you said before, space tourism might pick up on top
Speaker 1: of that, mining asteroids, harvesting helium from the Moon, servicing
Speaker 1: networks of space station satellites, extraterrestrial colonies in the future.
Speaker 1: We hope there are going to be a lot of
Speaker 1: space launches. So if that is the case, we really
Speaker 1: would need to find some kind of solution to the
Speaker 1: problem of space launch emissions and it's and it's byproducts. Yes,
Speaker 1: So do we have any such alternatives even in just
Speaker 1: planning stages. Yes. NASA has one type of fuel they're
Speaker 1: calling alice, which is short for aluminum ice, and they
Speaker 1: conducted a project with grad students at Perdu and Penn
Speaker 1: State with the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to
Speaker 1: create this this more environmentally friendly propellant from nanoscale aluminum
Speaker 1: powder and water ice wow uh and d. During combustion,
Speaker 1: it produces just hydrogen gas and aluminum ox it so
Speaker 1: not that bad uh. Part part of the idea here
Speaker 1: is that it could be manufactured on other water ice
Speaker 1: bearing places in space like the Moon or Mars or asteroids.
Speaker 1: And the aluminum nano particles are really the key here
Speaker 1: because they combusted lower temperatures than other fuels, like seven
Speaker 1: hundred degrees celsius rather than the standard two thousand um.
Speaker 1: They also conbusted faster than larger particles because of their
Speaker 1: increased surface area. So it's like a like a twitch
Speaker 1: gamer who turns their sensitivity levels all the way up. Uh,
Speaker 1: you're giving the researchers better control over the combustion and
Speaker 1: therefore over the rockets thrust. Uh. They did a proof
Speaker 1: of concept test in two thousand nine and successfully launched
Speaker 1: a small rocket with alice, a nine ft a K
Speaker 1: a about three meter rocket that they launched about one
Speaker 1: thousand three ft a k four hundred meters into the atmosphere,
Speaker 1: which is a really short distance. Granted it's not even
Speaker 1: about of the troposphere, but if production could be scaled up,
Speaker 1: the researchers involved really thought that alice could could one
Speaker 1: day replace traditional rocket fuel. And I haven't seen a
Speaker 1: whole lot of buzz about this one since that test
Speaker 1: in two thousand nine. We will be on the lookout.
Speaker 1: And one is another one that is definitely still being
Speaker 1: researched is mixtures based on paraffin wax. Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's a type of hydrocarbon wax that's commonly used for
Speaker 1: all sorts of things here on Earth, not related to rockets,
Speaker 1: like like it's used in candles, it's used in food storage,
Speaker 1: it's used in sculpting, and researchers specifically at Stanford are
Speaker 1: looking into how they can put it into hybrid rockets,
Speaker 1: which are so called because they incorporate both liquid and
Speaker 1: solid combustion components, generally an oxidizer that's stored as a
Speaker 1: liquid and then becomes a gas when they shoot it
Speaker 1: out to do the explosions. Now, I would ask, though,
Speaker 1: is paraffin wax that that's essentially a petroleum product, right,
Speaker 1: so that would be a hydrocarbon. Yeah, yeah, I mean yes,
Speaker 1: it's absolutely a hydrocarbon. It is going to be releasing
Speaker 1: c O two into the atmosphere. It's therefore going to
Speaker 1: be part part of this CO two problem of global warming,
Speaker 1: but maybe not as bad as a regular rocket. But
Speaker 1: it's it's just it's most of the uh combinations that
Speaker 1: they're using in it's only it's only releasing water, vapor
Speaker 1: and c O two and so you know, no hydrochloric acid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are other some of the other emissions are eliminated. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. All this talk about paraffin wax just has
Speaker 1: to be flashing back to Stephen King's it has that
Speaker 1: played a very important part in Oh what was it?
Speaker 1: What the paraffin wax. That's what the main character was
Speaker 1: using to or actually his little brother was using to
Speaker 1: make a little paper boat which he floats in the storm.
Speaker 1: We all flowed down here, Tim Curry high. This is
Speaker 1: not the first episode of Forward Thinking where we referred
Speaker 1: extensively to Tim Curry. It's almost there were huge nerds
Speaker 1: and really like Tim Curry. Um, Okay, Lauren, please continue. Okay. So,
Speaker 1: uh so, hybrid rockets are really cool because they can
Speaker 1: make launches safer, like less prone to catastrophic failure than
Speaker 1: either purely liquid or or solid fuel rockets, which you know,
Speaker 1: not having any more challenger disasters would be really cool. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: And so these researchers at Stanford have been working on
Speaker 1: a paraffin based fuel since two thousand one, and tests
Speaker 1: in collaboration with NASA up through or so as was
Speaker 1: the most recent that I've seen, but I think they're
Speaker 1: still working on it suggest that with further refinement, hybrid
Speaker 1: paraffin rockets could be not just cleaner and safer than
Speaker 1: today's rockets, but more efficient a k a cheaper as well.
Speaker 1: Ah Well, I mean we've always got an eye towards
Speaker 1: the bottom line and the dollar sign when it comes
Speaker 1: to rocket launches, and of course as that dollar sign
Speaker 1: comes down, we see more rocket launches, making this question
Speaker 1: even more important for us to answer. Well, and hypothetically,
Speaker 1: if it's more efficient, it's producing less of this byproduct
Speaker 1: as in CEO two, and therefore is having less of
Speaker 1: an environmental impact. Yeah, so I think, um, overall, I
Speaker 1: am optimistic because one, I think we're still pretty far
Speaker 1: out from having a thousand of these launches per year,
Speaker 1: and I think we're going to have some more time
Speaker 1: to refine our approaches and and make sure that the
Speaker 1: technologies we use are the most environmentally conscious that we
Speaker 1: can come up with that also are makes sense from
Speaker 1: a cost perspective. Plus, guys, we're totally going to have
Speaker 1: space elevators. Yeah, that's the thing I was about to
Speaker 1: bring up. I mean, all of this is played out
Speaker 1: on the assumption that we're going to continue to use
Speaker 1: propellant based rockets to get to space, which I think
Speaker 1: actually is probably a fairly safe assumption. But I think
Speaker 1: that we have for years, right, but we have in
Speaker 1: the past looked at alternative means of getting to space,
Speaker 1: and we we don't want to entirely rule those out
Speaker 1: because if somebody could actually get one working on a
Speaker 1: regular basis in a in a few easible way, that
Speaker 1: would be a wonderful alternative to rockets. Sure. Uh. And also,
Speaker 1: I mean we it's it's it's important to point out
Speaker 1: that the virgin galactic approach, this idea of launching a
Speaker 1: spacecraft from something that's already flying, that could obviously you
Speaker 1: have reduced the the need for actual rocket fuel because
Speaker 1: you aren't already at a higher altitude um and you're
Speaker 1: already traveling at a decent velocity, although nowhere close to
Speaker 1: escape velocity. I think that is another potential. Clearly that's
Speaker 1: not gonna work for every kind of spacecraft that we
Speaker 1: want to get out into space. And also, we keep
Speaker 1: hoping that we'll get to a level of sophistication where
Speaker 1: we can get enough stuff into space where we can
Speaker 1: then continually build stuff out in space already and so
Speaker 1: it's already out beyond the Earth's atmosphere and that's not
Speaker 1: a problem at all. That however, again we're talking twenty
Speaker 1: to forty years easy for that kind of stuff, because
Speaker 1: you still have to get the stuff up there initially,
Speaker 1: at least the baseline of whatever you're going to use,
Speaker 1: and then at that point you you probably need to
Speaker 1: be like mining some asteroids for extra materials, that kind
Speaker 1: of thing, And eventually you're gonna probably want to switch
Speaker 1: out your personnels. That's gonna involve people going down and
Speaker 1: coming back up. But but if you're able to do
Speaker 1: a lot of that work in space itself, you reduce
Speaker 1: the need for the number of launches on Earth. So
Speaker 1: there are a lot of interesting factors that could potentially
Speaker 1: be at play in the future. I've got an idea,
Speaker 1: what's that We're gonna pair this problem with our recent
Speaker 1: episode on mega tall buildings and just build a building
Speaker 1: that goes to space, none of this space elevator stuff.
Speaker 1: You can take the stairs. Yeah, I think. I think
Speaker 1: we talked about that in our Space Elevator's episode. Actually,
Speaker 1: we talked about the the idea of building a building
Speaker 1: so tall that you would be essentially in space. Didn't
Speaker 1: some do you actually proposed that, like some Russian guy
Speaker 1: a hundred years ago? Had I want to say, yes,
Speaker 1: I I it's tickling my memory, but it's been just
Speaker 1: long enough that I don't. I can't pull that information up,
Speaker 1: you know. I hate to be a naysayer but I
Speaker 1: think that's probably not possible. I'm pretty confident that you
Speaker 1: are correct in that assessment. Well, this was a lot
Speaker 1: of fun to look into because it was one of
Speaker 1: those things that before we started researching it we honestly
Speaker 1: didn't know, like, well, is there is there a measurable
Speaker 1: environmental impact? Um, it appears that there there is, And
Speaker 1: you could argue it's negligible, and I probably wouldn't argue
Speaker 1: against it right now, But then, keeping in mind this
Speaker 1: ramping up process, we will likely see it won't be
Speaker 1: negligible forever. So it's good to think about it now
Speaker 1: before we are forced to think about it in the future.
Speaker 1: But guys, please let us know what you think. Let
Speaker 1: us know if you have any suggestions for future episodes.
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