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It isn't Easy Being Green and Getting to LEO
MWTJ writes "The BBC has a story about the environmental impact of the space shuttle. One of the things that started the modern environmentalist movement were pictures of the Earth from space, so we could see the beauty of the planet as never before. We could also see environmental destruction from space. But what is the impact of the space program on our planet? The story talks about the switch to Freon-free insulation, the use of clean-burning hydrogen/LOX fuel, and other factors. What else could be done to get to space with minimal harm to the planet?"
I mean really, how much impact could any event have that only happens once every three or four years....
Three Squirrels
Develop nanotech and use it to build a space elevator. Cheap, clean, safe, easy access to space!
Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
Maybe if they used CFC-based insulation that was stronger, like they used to, they'd have fewer explosions therefore less polutants entering the atmosphere and fewer dead astronauts? Just my vote.
It's totally environmentally friendly and it can get you really high, really fast!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
While the effort is admirable, getting too bent out of shape over the space shuttle's emissions is a little myopic. Weighed against all of the benefits and advancements we've gleaned from the space program, I'd say the environmental impact is pretty negligible. The article itself suggests that the damage to wildlife from hydrochloric acid deposits is "minimal and manageable".
I can't imagine that the costs of upgrading a $1.7 billion shuttle to make NASA's once-in-a-blue-moon launches more earth-friendly will be reasonable for taxpayers. Environmentalists looking for something to complain about should have no trouble finding a better outlet for their ire in corporate America than at NASA.
domain combinatorics
Put this in perspective, people. There are TWO space shuttles still in service, and even though they have a CFC exemption, and it was the breaking off of a piece of that insulation that caused the Colombia disaster, they STILL use non-fluorocarbon (non-freon based) foam for insulation on the shuttles.
As stated in the comments to the article on the bottom of the page, underground fires and about a bazillion other natural sources have more of an environmental impact than the shuttle. If anything, industries and the world's large polluters ought to learn from the efficiency of NASA wiht regard to abusing/respecting the environment.
We do a shuttle launch once every, what, four months even under the optimal conditions that never happen? And the city of Houston, Texas alone is pumping out how much greenhouse gas every day just from the cars alone?
Why is it we never actually care about the environment except at times that it's stupid to do so? Oh noes, think what nuclear power could do to the environment under extreme and unlikely circumstances that can be totally avoided with a modicum of competent regulation! We'd better avoid that and stick with the huge belching coal plants built in the 1970s and grandfathered in from the time before emission controls, that's sooo much more ecologically friendly.
1) Get to space.
As long as you're stuck on this step, you're going to have to have an entire planet's worth of heavy industries, energy generation, and resource extraction being performed on the surface of said planet.
Arguing about the "greenness" of space exploration is like someone having a heart attack deciding not to call an ambulance because being a passenger in a vehicle that's going faster than the posted speed limits in city streets is a health hazard.
A space elevator (always popular on /.) would be about the cheapest way up in theory provided you write of the energy cost of building the damn thing over a long lifetime.
Still, I think the posts and articles about the environmental impact of the Shuttle are mostly crap. Cars that do 40mpg instead of 20mpg on an urban-cycle would have much more positive impact on the environment. Using the heat from power station cooling systems to heat offices/factories in local areas would do more. Recycling your plastic, glass bottles, cans, and paper would do more.
Nasty as the perchlorate SRBs are, they're worth the inconvenience if NASA can use them to build (say) a 100 ton heavy launcher to replace the Shuttle.
This is not a sig
and then as has happened in other fields - Western bleeding hearts set out to save the world via job-killing regulations at home, and then other countries (who could give a rat's ass about the environment) eat our lunch with cheaper products/services, ala China.
The path to hell is paved with good intentions..
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Sure it makes sense to worry about such things if you are making 100K+ cars, but a few space vehicles that already have to deal with some serious mechaqnical stresses? Dumb.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I'm sorry, but this is the same argument used with why we need to be driving hydrogen cars, and it irritates the shit out of me.
Skipping over the solid rocket boosters as cheerfully as the article summary did- perhaps Professor Fraser would care to explain to us where all the hydrogen and oxygen came from?
If you do the math in terms of the energy produced, and realize that both distillation-by-refridgeration and electrolysis are hugely inefficient, you start to realize the amount of energy required to make all that hydrogen and oxygen is incredible. Chemical methods involve pretty toxic chemicals, so you're not getting out of it that way. Guess how most of our (United States) electricity is supplied? That's right- coal. Which generates huge amounts of carbon soot, carbon dioxide, and radioactive particulate.
I noticed that they also skipped quite nicely over hydrazine, used in the thrusters...
Please help metamoderate.
Electromagnetic launchers are practical NOW. "Just accelerate the space cargo in a vacuum tube until escape velocity is achieved, while climbing a high mountain." Only one key technology has been needed, and it got invented just a couple years ago. At the END of that vacuum tube, a means is needed to keep the atmosphere from rushing in while still letting the cargo exit. The plasma valve is the answer to that problem.
http://www.nuclearspace.com/a_liberty_ship.htm It is simple, no nuclear materials comes out of the exausts. All you do is super heat some material to rediculous levels and your done. Any activity has a negative impact, but then the biggest human contibutor to radioactivity in the atmosphear is burning coal. As for accidents, you need about 1000 accidents to release as much nuclear materails as those above ground attomic tests. Oh, and make them BIG ...
Logic be DAMNED! It's all about the *cause* that matters with envirowacos. No go back to rubbing two sticks togeather. Better yet, dont breed! Humans are viri to the planet.
God damn that felt good. And yes, I was making fun of those tree huggers.
Life is not for the lazy.
Parent is actually correct. Damage to the shuttle due to foam coming off increased by a factor of 11 (!) after changing to the new enviro-wacko friendly formulation. See for example this.
Though, that won't work for manned craft, and you need to keep in mind how much power one would use operating one.
Forget that. Taking off using a mass driver would be like using a railgun as your engine. Great, you take off but you blow a crater the size of Providence, RI in the Earth below by the time you reach orbit.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
There is a sound suppression system built into the launch pad which is designed to prevent the infrastructure from being damaged from the sound waves generated beginning six seconds before liftoff when the orbiter's main engines ignite and run up to full thrust.
Watch launch footage carefully and you will be able to see that the clouds mentioned begin to appear at that point. While some of them are deflected exhaust from the aluminum perchlorate fuel used for the solid rocket boosters, most of the big clouds are actually water steam.
This can be confirmed by looking at footage of liquid-fuelled rocket launches. Liquid fuel doesn't produce those big visible trails the way solid fuel does -- the clouds are visible only at first and the rocket itself has no trail as long as it has no solid boosters. (The shuttle does indeed lose its trail after SRB separation, as do Deltas and Titans and others).
i am a soviet space shuttle
The BBC itself probably impacts the environment to a greater degree than the Shuttle. Think of all the fossil energy used to generate the power needed to watch TV and radio while they are on, to generate those signals, the environmental impact of the staff, the transport requirements for the staff, etc.
Now, let's not propagate urban legends farther than they need to go. Yes, they had problems with the insulation when they first started using the non-freon stuff. It had nothing to do with the Columbia disaster, however -- all the problems were solved back around 1997 or so. It also had nothing to do with freon or lack thereof, it was just a different enough material that they needed to make some changes.
... that was directly resposible for killing the Columbia Astronauts and nearly killed the present set? Yep, gotta love putting the astronauts in sever risk to get rid of a couple pounds of freon. Stupidity reigns supreme when you deal with environmentalist.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
Yeah, as long as we can convince ourselves that they are crazy, we can pretend we aren't in the process of destroying the very environment that keeps us alive. Then we don't have to deal with the problems we caused! Yay!
Seriously, let's hope that you (and other people like you) can get their heads out of their asses before it's too late.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I think the payback NASA has made for the environment outweighs any real impact that they may have negatively made with their programs.
If you took the derivatives of all we have learned and developed from the space race I would say overall the planet is much better for it. Space flight requires all sorts of inventiveness and efficiency. These techniques and ideas spin off eventually into the consumer world to benefit everyone.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Here in Australia we have over 40% of the world's supply of uranium and we have one (1) nuclear reactor which contributes little to none of the national power supply. You'd figure we'd be utilizing all the uranium assets we have to make hydrogen and export it to the world. You'd figure we'd have paved roads to all the populated areas of our country. You'd figure we'd have a massive pipeline to deliver desalinated water to our farmers. It's not like we can't afford it, we have a massive budget surplus and next to no national debt.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I don't call greens envirowackos. I call them deluded. They cling to a belief of an 'ideal' cozy green gaia where none really exists: life on earth exists on the whims of forces so powerful we glimpse them but rarely: the recent earthquake activity in the Indian ocean that caused the tsunami (which some nuts blamed on global warming), once-in-a-century micrometeor strikes, etc. They look for micro-effects caused by man and miss out totally on the macro effects of solar cycles and aperiodic weather patterns.
Worse, they bully governments and industry into stasis, as increasing amounts of money have to be spent to come up to the green earth ideal, even as entire national industries become noncompetitive, causing flight of capital to the third world.
Also, people who call greens 'envirowackos' are not above name-calling themselves: they like words like 'republinazi' and so forth. Well, this one likes clean surroundings as much as the next man, but also believes that you can take cleanliness and lack of toxins too far. I have travelled in India (I have family there) and you know what? lots of Indians in urban centres survive with water levels so contaminated that according to every FDA rule I know of they should all be dying off (I drank bottled water, would've fallen sick in an instant given my immune system). And oddly enough , India (esp Indian cities) have much greater population growth than the US/EU -- even taking rural migration into account. The population also seems remarkably free of the dust/pollen allergies we see so much here. Perhaps species' adaptive capabilities deserve more credit than you give?
Don't get me wrong, clean air and water is important, but choking industry for a treaty based on starry eyed green politics and bad economics is not the way to do it.
Go somewhere random
Yeah, let's kill millions of people every year, mostly children, by banning mostly harmless DDT!
What utter stupidity! The EPA's ban on DDT has caused ZERO deaths. By 1972 malaria had been eradicated from the US, so there was no need to spray with DDT (or any insecticide) for malaria control. When there have been some small outbreaks since 1972, they have been eradicated by other, more effective, insecticides. The radical right seems to think that DDT is the only insecticide in existence -- and that the EPA regulations are binding on every country in the world.
There is no ban on using DDT to fight malaria and there never has been. DDT is banned for agricultural use (and rightly so because of environmental damage) but can still be used for disease prevention. The radical right pretends that there is a ban so they can blame malaria deaths on environmentalists.
According to the EPA's December 31, 1972 press release on the DDT ban:
"An end to the continued domestic usage of the pesticide was decreed on June 14, 1972, when William D. Ruckelshaus, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, issued an order finally cancelling nearly all remaining Federal registrations of DDT products. Public health, quarantine, and a few minor crop uses were excepted, as well as export of the material."
So it was still legal to use it for public health, quarantine, and to export it.
"The effective date of the EPA June cancellation action was delayed until the end of this year to permit an orderly transition to substitute pesticides"
See that? "Substitute pesticides." Didn't know they had those, did you?
"During the past 30 years, approximately 675,000 tons have been applied domestically. The peak year for use in the United States was 1959 when nearly 80 million pounds were applied. From that high point, usage declined steadily to about 13 million pounds in 1971, most of it applied to cotton.
The decline was attributed to a number of factors including increased insect resistance, development of more effective alternative pesticides, growing public and user concern over adverse environmental side effects..."
Again, insects had become increasingly resistand and more effective alternatives already existed.
The World Health Organization's plan for malaria prevention in Sri Lanka after the tsunami stated:
"Endemic sporadic malaria close to the affected areas transmitted by An.culicifacies, which has been considered DDT-resistant for many years, but is still sensitive to organophosphates, such as malathion, and pyrethroids."
The mosquitoes in Sri Lanka, as in many other parts of the world, have evolved resistance to DDT. It doesn't work any more. In fact, that is the reason why they stopped using DDT in Sri Lanka. It wasn't because of any ban. It was because it became ineffective. If the radical right wasn't so busy trying to ban the teaching of evolution, they might have less trouble grasping the concept that mosquitoes evolve resistance to DDT. Fortunately, the World Health Organization does not consist of flat-Earth conservatives, so they sent malathion to Sri Lanka -- which can actually kill the mosquitoes there.
Before you waste all of our time with the much-repeated claim by the right that aid organizations won't fund DDT spraying to control malaria, I'll shoot that claim down, too:
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria finances some DDT spraying in Somalia. USAID pays for some spraying of DDT to prevent malaria in developing countries.
According to a news story from the July 18, 2005 issue of The Monitor (Uganda), Dr Herbert Wilson Lwanga, the Executive Director of the Community Welfare Services, said his agency had received funding for DDT spraying programs from the Global Fund.
Until you can show me an example of where a non-government entity kills millions every year by polluting, I'd say the radical enviromentalists have quite the
What else could be done to get to space with minimal harm to the planet?
Orion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion
The development of materials is always a stepwise process and involves not only the identification of the cool properties that you are seeking but also a clear understanding of the shortcomings of the material. And believe me a material as anisotropic as this material is bound to have some interesting ones. Recognize that only now has graphite composite technology reached the mainstream - 787 will be the first commercial aircraft with widespread composite primary structures. Many aircraft including advanced combat aircraft still use aluminum for primary structures.
Your simplification of the erection process suggests some rather sloppy thinking too. There is a significant energy difference between LEO (shuttle territory) and GEO. The largest rockets can place about 8 metric tons in GEO. That is in GEO- not in a transfer orbit. Shuttle has no lift capabilty to GEO at all. You must move the machines for hoisting materials and to integrate these structures into a load-bearing whole. That requires power and that means a lot of mass- that must be emplaced before you can begin hoisting. Before first fiber down you must stationkeep this system and implement a comm and control system. In any event this means you will have to place the largest geosync satellite ever launched and assemble it remotely from multiple pieces autonomously. This has never been done and represents a non-trivial task. I would estimate that you will have to place at least 50 metric tons at geosync. This will require at least a billion dollars in launch and integration costs as well as the development and testing of rendezvous and dock system as well as probably another half billion for the spacecraft themselves- and that is a very lowball estimate. It is much more likely to be three times that. This assumes that you can make fiber in megaton lots. Assuming it is on the order of high performance graphite/epoxy tows it will be $20-80 /lbm. Very likely it will be far more.
And just what does this get you? Well you are not really in a great location. You still have to use in-space propulsion stages to get anywhere of interest like the moon. Departing from the elevator is of course straightforward but you must consider the mechanics and threat from an arriving vehicle. They must circularize and match plane from an arbitrary lunar orbit for example. This does cost energy- especially plane changes which are highly energy intensive. This means that the stage is heavier and more complex. A stage coming from Mars may well find it better to just directly aerobrake instead of using the elevator.
In the end the elevator is useful but is not a panacea- you must have good rockets and aerobraking technology. SInce you must have those anyway the incremental benefit of the elevator is reduced. The cost of maintenance is also not yet defined- and could be very high. The consequences of objects passing slowly through the VanAllen belts could also be significant- rockets generally pass through them in minutes- even a fast elevator will place the cargo in the belts for hours at a time.
So give this some thought- there is more to a car than just the tires or engine- it all has to work together. Without an internally consistent architecture the design will be a disaster. I suspect that the elevator will not be economically viable unless there is a very high demand- well above what is envisioned until very late in the century. Consider the marginal cost effectiveness of the Chunnel.
As I see it, the part that has the most impact on the environment and as well is the most critical part today are the solid fuel boosters.
One feature that could be used for the light shuttle is to have a launch vehicle that carries and accelerates the shuttle to a speed and altitude where the rockets can work best. By using ordinary jet engines for the first step you wouldn't need to carry the oxygen for the first stage, which is a major weight contribution.
This will of course require several different design issues to be solved, but since Burt Rutan has done this (on a sub-orbital scale) it isn't impossible.
If the carrier would be able to go supersonic before the release of the shuttle it would be even better, but then there are a lot of issues to take into account like interfering shock waves occuring at separation. A lot of fun for those guys that like extreme calculations! :->
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
You're confusing facts. I know Columbia was using the older foam, and nowhere in my post did I imply that the CFC-11 was responsible for Columbia's loss. Read the damn post before acusing me of mixing things up.
Now, as for backing my damage assertion up: how's this: (for the math challenged, 308/40=approx. 8 times the damage). That's just during the initial imspection.
Who's wrong now enviro-boy?
I highly agree that electromagnetic launchers would be damn useful. I also think that most people are thinking of using them in the wrong way. Let me explain:
Due to high acceleration, electromagnetic launchers are probably not the best choice for launching humans or delicate equipment. Rockets are likely to be cheaper for this for the time being. In order to have a launcher which would be useful for human launches, the launcher would have to be very long, and thus very expensive. However, a launcher which was designed for bulk transport would not need to be very expensive at all. This is because, unlike in a rocket, the majority of capital expense stays on the planet. In order to have a cheap (and thus, likely to be actually built) system, you want to minimize the expense involved in building the launcher. One of the best ways to do this is to reduce the size of the projectile. People tend to think of launchers as firing something about the size of a Gemini capsule or Space Shuttle. However, if the launcher is going to fire a projectile the size of a coke can, a much smaller launcher could be built. Electromagnetic launchers can have very high fire rates - why launch one large projectile when many small ones will contain the same mass and use the same energy?
The atmosphere of course puts limits on the size reduction of the projectile. A large or dense projectile loses a smaller proportion of its energy to drag. However, if we make the launcher small enough to put on an airplane, then we can launch from the stratosphere for a fairly low cost. This would enable the use of small projectiles without too much energy loss to atmospheric drag. I would expect the cost of a launcher to be less than the price of an airplane which could mount one. Lets assume it is a plane similar to a 727. A 727 has a payload of about 50,000 kg including fuel. Let's say that 10,000 kg of that is projectiles, with the rest of the payload being used to carry the crew, the launcher, and the fuel for the plane and the launcher. To get to LEO, the fuel for the launcher would be about 2 times the mass of the projectiles, so that works out about right for a short flight. Assuming a fire rate of about 1/sec for 1 kg projectiles, the payload of the plane would be shot in about 3 hours.
So, presuming we had a bulk launcher which cost $20 million and could launch small projectiles into LEO at not much more than the cost of fuel, the price per kg would likely be on the order of $10/kg. Of course the launcher could only be used for launching bulk materials, but as an example:
A Delta 4 heavy rocket delivers a payload of 23000 kg to LEO at a cost of about $170 million. If we were to take that same $170 million and put $20 million into a plane-based launcher, $50 million into various upkeep costs (personnel, ground site, the inevitable bureaucracy), and $100 million into launch fuel, you could put 10 million kg into LEO. It would take a year of flying 3 flights a day with the launcher plane to put this much mass in orbit.
Of course, the mass would not be a nicely formed satellite or spaceship, but the point is that for the same cost, you get to put 4300 times the mass into orbit. 100 million kg is about twice the mass of a WWII battleship like the Bismarck, and is plenty of mass to build an orbital factory to turn some of that mass into something useful. In addition, metal encapsulated fuel pellets could be sent into orbit - fuel in orbit is worth much more than fuel on the ground.
This sort of project would only take a few million to get off the ground, and if things don't work, then you have the opportunity to retool your system, which is not as easy with exploding rockets. The real challenge lies in making the projectiles go where they are supposed to so they can be gathered in orbit to be used.