Should we ban kerolox rockets

[xenomorph555]

Personally I'm not a "BOO HOO, THE ENVIRONMENT, HUMANS ARE EVIL, WE SHOULD GO BACK TO CAVES" type person but I do feel we should do stuff to protect the environment, anyway kerolox rockets are probably the most CO2 intensive vehicles on the planet, with at least 2 launches per month and if SpaceX succeeds with their plans we could have up to 5-10 keralox rockets, maybe. Should they be banned, should all rockets be forced to use hydrolox?

[SuperFastJellyfish]

Personally I'm not a "BOO HOO, THE ENVIRONMENT, HUMANS ARE EVIL, WE SHOULD GO BACK TO CAVES" type person but I do feel we should do stuff to protect the environment, anyway kerolox rockets are probably the most CO2 intensive vehicles on the planet, with at least 2 launches per month and if SpaceX succeeds with their plans we could have up to 5-10 keralox rockets, maybe. Should they be banned, should all rockets be forced to use hydrolox?

Banning them wouldn't scratch the surface of pollution. There are millions of cars on the road every day. Even a 1000 launches a year would be negligible compared to that.

Edited December 19, 2014 by SuperFastJellyfish
One too many words.

[ZedNova]

I'm pretty sure our cars and coal power plants are way worse than even 100 kerolox launches a month.

[Bill Phil]

Hmm.

Oh, wait. There's something called SRBs, they're way worse than kerolox.

[Starman4308]

No. There's a good chance you might increase overall carbon emissions: you probably burn much more carbon just making the rocket parts, making other fuels costs carbon (where do you think the electricity to split water comes from), and employees often spend their wages on things which cause carbon emissions, like vacations.

On top of that, as mentioned, rocket launches count for an utterly minute fraction of carbon emissions.

[Nuke]

i bet rocket makers pay less carbon tax than car makers. if our power grid was nuclear, then we could really cut down on the cost of lh2/lox production. but i think its sufficiently more expensive to build cryofuel rockets than anything you save from the reduction in fuel cost.

[Frozen_Heart]

GeneCash you evidently don't have a clue how global warming works...

What we need to be working on is moving the Earth out in its orbit so it cools off a little and offsets "us doing things".

And with that line I've got to assume you're trolling.

Edited December 19, 2014 by Frozen_Heart

[Nuke]

also population is not really so much an issue as 'western lifestyle'. a majority of earth's population lives on a bare minimum of resources. earth could support a much larger population if nobody owned suvs and we didnt take 2 30-minute showers a day and dont set our thermostats to 78. but this is 'murica.

[xenomorph555]

also population is not really so much an issue as 'western lifestyle'. a majority of earth's population lives on a bare minimum of resources. earth could support a much larger population if nobody owned suvs and we didnt take 2 30-minute showers a day and dont set our thermostats to 78. but this is 'murica.

But those "majority" have terrible lives, I say less people, better lives.

[MBobrik]

But those "majority" have terrible lives, I say less people, better lives.

I say more CO2 neutral energy sources and no need to reduce us to rural India quality of life nor reduce the population.

Oh, and if I were really draconian, I would not ban kerosene fuel, I would just make mandatory that all carbon in it comes from captured CO2 from the atmosphere.

Edited December 19, 2014 by MBobrik

[Drunken Hobo]

Let's have a go at some chemistry:

As far as I know, in 2015 the Falcon Heavy will be the largest LOX/RP-1 rocket in operation. It has a mass of 1,463,000kg. The Falcon Heavy has a ~30:1 mass ratio, which means roughly 1,414,000 kg of fuel.

For simplicity's sake, let's say that RP-1 is mostly dodecane.

C₁₂H₂₆ + 18.5 O₂ ---> 12CO₂ + 13H₂O

Molar mass of C₁₂H₂₆ = 170.33 g mol^{−1}

Molar mass of 18.5O₂ = 592 g mol^{−1}

Molar mass of 12CO₂ = 528.12 g mol^{−1}

So ~22.34% of the rocket fuel is kerosene. That's 315,000 kg of kerosene, which would produce 980,000 kg of CO₂ per launch, or 980 tonnes. The average emissions per US citizen per year is 17.6 tonnes. That means just 56 Americans in a year will produce more CO₂ than a Falcon Heavy launch. For a sense of scale, the USA's population grows by 56 every 13 minutes.

You could actually launch 5.5 million Falcon Heavys in a year, and you still wouldn't match the US's annual CO₂ output. Using a Dragon V2 on each one, you could launch the entire population of California to Mars, and still have room for the Alaskans.

So in short, it's utterly negligible.

(I realise rocket tanks aren't split by the exact stoichiometric quantities, but I wanted to see if I still remembered my chemistry. I did. My mathematics on the other hand...)

Edited December 19, 2014 by Drunken Hobo

[Linear]

The above post was both factual and hilarious.

What a citizen.

[xenomorph555]

The kerolox rockets will still need to be taken out of service eventually.

[SargeRho]

No, they won't. Kerolox rockets are easier to handle and smaller than Hydrolox rockets. They are also not much dirtier than Hydrolox rockets, considering nearly all hydrogen used as fuel is black hydrogen, coming from natural gas.

[Ralathon]

The kerolox rockets will still need to be taken out of service eventually.

Why? Unless we get some truly game changing technology there's no reason to replace kerolox rockets with hydrolox. As shown above their environmental impact is nothing compared to the global output of humanity.

[Bill Phil]

Maybe eventually replace them with propalox or metholox for better efficiency, but that's the only real reason.

[Starman4308]

In the extreme long term, petroleum will become so expensive that RP-1 will become uneconomical. At that point, either we've developed effective large-scale alternative energy sources (such as effective biofuels), or humanity is in a bad spot.

Until that point, however, there is really no point in replacing RP-1, unless propalox or methalox become more economically viable than RP-1. Even in terms of carbon emissions, the increased expense of hydrolox fuel tanks and engines strongly suggests to me that, even ignoring the carbon cost of splitting the water, you'd probably emit more net carbon with a hydrolox stage than a kerolox stage. I might be wrong, but cost tends to be correlated with carbon expenditure, and hydrolox tanks and engines are really expensive.

[magnemoe]

also population is not really so much an issue as 'western lifestyle'. a majority of earth's population lives on a bare minimum of resources. earth could support a much larger population if nobody owned suvs and we didnt take 2 30-minute showers a day and dont set our thermostats to 78. but this is 'murica.

Actually that is not longer true, most people on earth is managing pretty decent, not US or EU middle class but more like middle class than poor.

Fun fact is that most people today have an mobile phone

[kujuman]

Who cares about the environment? Pretty much no one. What we care about are human lives; we think about protecting the environment as a means to protect ourselves.

To this end, looking at the human cost of spaceflight, fueling and assembly of rockets is far more costly than any environmental costs of missions (save say, a crash of a tank full of UDMH or the like). Even as good as we are, accidents still kill folks. The added difficulty of handling H2 probably increases this cost somewhat, and its emission consists of a great deal of H2O, an extremely potent gg at altitude.

Now of course, I don't think AGW is really something we ought to concern ourselves given the empirical evidence not really fitting the modeling of it, but even so, the other posters who commented about the total production chain are absolutely correct that there are other factors in play.

[magnemoe]

No, they won't. Kerolox rockets are easier to handle and smaller than Hydrolox rockets. They are also not much dirtier than Hydrolox rockets, considering nearly all hydrogen used as fuel is black hydrogen, coming from natural gas.

I agree here, not really an issue even with trucks if everybody else used electrical or hybrids.

Yes some chance rockets will switch to methane because better ISP, hydrogen has to low density to use on lower stages,but very good on upper ones.

Note that both the space shuttle and ariane has an TWR below one at launch without the SRB. Like in KSP using side boosters work better than an solid first stage.

Get rid of coal for energy production and most is solved, then do some extra work like getting rid of gas outside of peak generation, mostly hybrid or electrical cars and its no issue anymore.

[Whirligig Girl]

Hypergolic rockets like the Proton are faaaar worse, and there's very very few Kerlox rockets that are launched often. Anyway, Hydrogen and Oxygen rockets are much more efficient, and iirc SpaceX uses them.

[Kibble]

Kerosene is a fossil fuel which means its not a renewable resource right? It makes the most sense in the long term to switch to methane or something that can actually be produced.

[Kryten]

Hypergolic rockets like the Proton are faaaar worse, and there's very very few Kerlox rockets that are launched often. Anyway, Hydrogen and Oxygen rockets are much more efficient, and iirc SpaceX uses them.

Out of 86 launch attempts this year year so far, 40 were by launchers mainly using kerolox; that's more than a few. Incidentally you recall incorrectly, all flown SpaceX rockets have been entirely kerolox.

[hieywiey]

No they shouldn't be banned. Plus that would be banning the Saturn V, basically banning pure awesomeness.

[GreeningGalaxy]

As fossil fuels start to run out and we start to launch stuff to space more and more often, I'd think setting up some kind of large-scale water electrolysis system to fuel hydrolox rockets would be the best solution - then rockets would just end up part of the water cycle, and we wouldn't have to keep doing expensive drilling operations to get ahold of the propellant. In the meantime, since rockets are such an incredibly negligible consumer of petroleum and producer of emissions, there's absolutely no reason to ban kerolox rockets - that would just make getting stuff to space even harder, and it's already pretty stupidly hard, what with our society and economy structured the way they are (and also because it takes 10 km/s delta-V just to reach orbit). The less we hobble the space industry, the better. Despite what you might hear from the far right, basically nothing done by anyone in space (barring accidents and military stuff) will have any non-negligible negative effect on Earth or its permanent population.