Rocket Lab to bounce back from July's orbital fail with bulging payloads and parachuting Electrons California-based Rocket Lab is to resume launches within the month after an Electron payload failed to reach orbit in July. The 13th launch for the company saw a "single anomalous electrical connection" do for the mission as the second stage engine shut down prematurely. The gang continued receiving telemetry from the doomed …
Going into space actually gives us a far more accurate idea of what we are doing to this planet as well as providing the data that can help to devise mitigations to what we have done and are doing to the planet.
It would be far more helpful if everyone understood the materials used in everything we buy and the potential consequences for the environment and then either simply not buying anything that is detrimental or actively lobbying for alternatives that are not detrimental as well as doing as much as possible to recycle all that can be.
I would prefer we get in space sooner rather than later and start mining other resourses than the Earth.
Make mining on Earth a thing of the past and economically unviable by taxation or legislation.
I would hate to be stuck on spaceship Earth if the greedy sods are allowed to finish strip mining it.
Imagine being stuck at the bottom of a gravity well with no resources, having to mine trash piles for the refined metals, having to demolish housing to reclaim steel.
With exponential birth rates, disease, famines, will no-one think of the children and build us some colony world vessels.
A single rocket launch has CO2 emissions about the same as the annual emissions from 73 cars. In other words, so little it's not even worth thinking about. Even if rockets get more common, we're still looking at the entire world's launches being less relevant to the climate than a single small town. There are potential concerns about other pollution, such as soot and metal particles being emitted in parts of the atmosphere that don't get pollution from any other sources at all, but even there the quantities are likely so small when spread across such a large volume that it's unlikely to be particularly significant. The Earth is really big, and there just aren't that many rockets.
On the other hand, as others have already noted, being able to put things into space to look back down at Earth has been one of the most important ways for us to learn what we actually are doing to the planet. The benefits from just a couple of Earth-observation satellites easily outweighs the combined environmental effects of all rockets ever launched.
As far as I can see, this planet is already wrecked beyond hope.
We need to get off it and move to another one as fast as possible, before the inevitable end.
And yes, that does mean that the next one will get wrecked, too. And the one after that... and so on.
But (hopefully) at least some of the lessons we learn might be used to good effect along the way, rather than fighting a lost battle here.
Not wrecked beyond hope. Under a constant state of change, with a grim future. We humans create a lot of change intentionality & unintentionally, we just need to learn to control it better on a large scale.
To quote musk or one of those futurist types, when asked "when do you think we'll have the technology to terraform Mars?" they replied, "We already do. We're already actively terraforming Earth, just unintentionally. And without direction, since the end result may be an environment that's completely uninhabitable for humans."
Don't give up just yet. We went down this path by accident, but with new & better technology we may be able to not only stop the damage being done, but also reverse it.
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