Space shots are not without environmental cost. Every ascending rocket injects damaging exhaust gases into the upper atmosphere. The upper air is not massive. There’s an impact when we pollute it. A few rockets make little difference, but thousands may do much harm, as may the proposed renewal of supersonic passenger air travel.
We can choose to launch billionaires into space and the thousands of wealthy tourists that would like to follow them (Report, July 10). We can nip supersonically across the Atlantic to shop, to come back a few hours later. Or we can use our precious access to space to launch satellites to watch our own planet, explore the solar system and help everything from our position-finding to our remote phones.
We’ve damaged the stratosphere before, with the ozone hole. Margaret Thatcher’s prescient 1989 speech to the UN, documenting the collapse of ozone, noted the importance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (soon to report its sixth assessment). She said reason “enables us to explore the heavens . . . Now we must use our reason to find a way in which we can live with nature, and not dominate nature.”
She was right. Ozone is taking decades to repair. We need to think carefully whether we once again abuse the upper atmosphere, or instead use it wisely for science and humanity.
Euan G Nisbet
Egham, Surrey, UK
Letter: Ozone damage was a topic Thatcher worried about - Financial Times
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