Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket tests in Texas are emitting so much methane you can see it from space
(fortune.com)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 22 Aug 2023 04:00
https://lemmy.world/post/3599939
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 22 Aug 2023 04:00
https://lemmy.world/post/3599939
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.
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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.
Then Bezos proceeded to spray champagne over him while he was trying to make a quick speech.
Imagine being the biggest asshole on a stage with William Shatner.
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.
My oil stocks say keep it here. I won’t be alive to find out what happens. /s
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
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
Bet if Elon was in charge he’d find a way to crash it.
“wahhhh, Twitter, wahhhh”
If they found an asteroid they liked, they might try to alter its orbit to put it on a collision course with the moon in order to make it more convenient to mine. Don’t underestimate how stupid people can be.
At worst it’d be a new crater and debris thrown into orbit. The very largest asteroid thrown at the moon, even like Ceres, would be a peashooter at a barge.
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.
I don’t think you quite grasp how enormously big space is.
I agree, it’s difficult for anyone to truly grasp how big space is. The problem is we’re not interested in 99.9999999…% of space, we’re interested in key points. You can drop one grain of bright pink sand on a mountain and no one would care or notice. If you only concentrate that on one path up the mountain and back down, eventually the infinite number of people traversing/dropping on that path will be noticeable and have an effect.
Honestly? You can’t collapse the moon’s ecosystem because the moon doesn’t have an ecosystem.
I never said anything specific to an eco system
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
Always knew bezos was a cheap skeet. Can’t even properly pay his employees. So why should he make proper rockets. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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: spinoff.nasa.gov
Return on investment: thehill.com/…/3721375-how-much-does-nasa-return-t…
Billionaire space folly will attract 100% tax when I am finally in charge.
Eating the billionaires sounds more and more attractive every day.
Eating the rich just gives you gas (and prion disease). Compost the rich.
If BO is being that careless with methane emissions then they are breaking laws. Report them
billionaires existing should be illegal
Trickle down pollution.
Well how else is he going to find a new planet… duh!
Gotta ruin a planet to travel to a new planet
If you can see it from space where is the photo?
There was a link to the data in the article that you didn’t read: data.carbonmapper.org/#13.24/31.428/-104.72174
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/22228d17-b92d-4a3a-b735-a7443e76c908.jpeg">
Blue origins name checks out…
Fun notes from America’s other privately owned, publicly funded space program. Even if you think that privatization of space is a good thing (you’re wrong, it’s not, but let’s just assume for the sake of argument that it is) how do you justify the fact that the public takes on huge deaths of the development cost, then has to pay to use the service, then has to pay to clean up externalities like an ocean of methane in the atmosphere?
Because public programs were somehow even more expensive for the same externalities and service.
I would say purely “because it works”. SpaceX has received a ton of funding, for sure. But they’ve delivered incredible advancements in reusable rocketry, methalox fuel cycles, cost to orbit and much more, while SLS was literally a flying scrap pile that was late and over budget despite being reused 1980s tech.
Let’s not pretend that NASA rockets were really public work either, with most of the development and construction done by contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Aerojet Rocketdyne and more… But these old guard companies were happy to keep turning out the same old product with incremental improvements.
SpaceX could have been a tremendous failure or success with the risks they’ve taken, and we’re all lucky it turned out to be a success (so far…). It says it all when they are going to launch Orion on SLS but Starship is going to be waiting there at the moon for them. Well, if it doesn’t blow up on the pad.
The space program of every nation have always worked that way. Even the Soviets were using Rhode Schwarz made gyroscopes. The Apollo rockets were built by the private sector.
The only real difference now is the ferrying contracts.
Then it needs to stop.
So what? What are you going to do about it?
A book of matches is a good start.
Well, just when I manage to stop worrying about climate change so much…
The hottest summer in recorded history is when you decide to stop worrying about climate change?
I guess his ex wife will need to fund methane capture programs now to tidy up his mess
It sounds like they should be more careful with how they store their methane.
I do want to stress though, that I think that space technology is the single most important subject we can focus on, except maybe medical. If extravagant trips for billionaire’s can fund a bunch of it for now, that’s fine by me. Only really means that governments should be doing more.
Every day, the sun emits roughly a billion times more energy than the earth uses. That is, all our technology, all our food, all animals, all plants and all the energy needed to create all weather combined consumes about one billionth of the sun’s output. The rest is sent into deep space.
This waste of the sun’s energy is so vast, that we as a species absolutely want to start capturing more of it as soon as possible, rather than squabbling in the mud for fractions of the 0.0000001% of the sun’s output the earth uses today. Obviously we need our planet to survive until then, but getting proper infrastructure in orbit and beyond is such a massive game changer.
Which is why we should not be leaving it to these billionaires.
FUCKING FUND NASA instead of these fascists
Yeah, but prior to spacex coming along, NASA had done nothing major for ages. We can blame the system or the politicking, but possibly the one good thing Elon did with his fortune was revive the space industry.
I agree to some of it, but also disagree on other parts.
Energy availability, in the future of humanity, will not be the constraining factor. There will be enoigh electric energy from solar panels on planetary surfaces (be it Earth or others). Resources (mining, plants) will be the constraining factor for economy.
Be that as it may, my main point would be that basic orbital and interplanetary infrastructure is an incredibly worthwhile investment since it will allow us to start tapping into energy collection, as well as mining, of a different order of magnitude than we currently have access to on earth :)
Yeah, my point was kinda that you would need to land on a solid surface to mine metals. But now that I think about it, it could also be done on asteroids.
Yo dawg we heard you like greenhouse gases.
Dudes the fuckin antichrist
So we have hydrogen as rocket fuel that does not produce greenhouse gasses when burned and they decide to develop methane as a fuel source instead! Why!?!
Methane is easier to store and doesn’t embrittle the pressure vessel.
Each fuel has it’s own use case, but in the case of reusable rockets…
Hydrogen is harder to store, it leaks out of everything. Methane can sit in a tank for a long time. Holding a tank of methane so you can relight a rocket and land after being in space for a long time is a big advantage, and keeps you from having to throw away everything each flight.
Every day on Lemmy is a TIL with knowledgeable responses like these 👇
Hydrogen itself is a strong greenhouse gas and leaks from everything, so it wouldn’t necessarily be better.
Hydrogen requires energy to get, which practically requires fuel to be burned. Sure, you could use green energy, but you could also still build the green energy and just offset other energy demand elsewhere, which would take dirty energy off the grid.
This isn’t mentioning all the issues with hydrogen, the largest probably being that it does not like being contained. It’s literally just a proton and electron. It’s tiny, so really nothing can contain it perfectly.
I dislike Blue Origin as much as the next guy, but IMO the article (or at least the headline) distracts from the real problem here (the fossil fuel industry):