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.

  • BirdyBoogleBop@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    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!?!

    • LastYearsPumpkin@feddit.ch
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • ammonium@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Hydrogen itself is a strong greenhouse gas and leaks from everything, so it wouldn’t necessarily be better.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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 swaths 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?

    • evranch@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Cynoid@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Because public programs were somehow even more expensive for the same externalities and service.

  • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The state air regulator, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, doesn’t impose limits on methane emissions or require disclosure of releases.

    Well there’s your problem.

  • rallatsc@slrpnk.net
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    1 year ago

    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):

    An air permit application filed with the TCEQ in January 2020 said the company expected to routinely dump LNG into the air to the tune of 3.4 million cubic feet a year, which would work out to more than 60 tons of methane.

    Of course, Blue Origin’s emissions pale in comparison with those from its suppliers in the natural gas industry. 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

  • A2PKXG@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    I guess his ex wife will need to fund methane capture programs now to tidy up his mess

  • wagoner@infosec.pub
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • gandalf_der_12te@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    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.”


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