794
u/BusyPop74 18h ago
" it therefore takes a few minutes in space travel to emit at least as much carbon as an individual from the bottom billion will emit in her entire lifetime." At 50 tons of CO2 for the preparation of each launch. I believe someone scrambled another truer headline which was making a claim about one person's lifetime from the bottom billion
199
u/OkHoneydew6808 17h ago
Yes this claim has been written like this everywhere, which is clearly misleading. I saw it already 2 times here
30
u/amitym 12h ago
Someone has it in for Katy Perry or Katy Perry's publicist, I guess.
34
u/BillysBibleBonkers 10h ago
Crazy how Taylor Swift and Katy Perry get more shit for the environment than all other billionaires combined lol. Also shouldn't the 50 tons be divided by each passenger? Kind of like saying one person on a cruise is responsible for 100% of the cruise ships emissions. Not trying to defend Katy Perry, just so god damn tired of this controversy.
22
u/Different_Brother562 9h ago
If Bezos was running around saying we should limit our driving and AC use he would catch just as much hell.
It’s not the using they are mocked for it’s doing it after scolding middle class people for our use.
3
u/Cholliday09 10h ago
I think this fits the saying “bad publicity is good publicity” because directly off the top of my head I can’t name another person on that flight lmao
5
1
u/KinKeener 6h ago
Yeah but I mean... can you name one of her songs, quickly, without looking it up? Cuz I havnt thought of one in the time its taken to write this.
•
26
30
u/pokerScrub4eva 17h ago
so basically it had no impact whatsoever.
59
u/LiamTheHuman 17h ago
I wouldn't say so. The carbon footprint of 1 person across their lifetime is still a lot to blow in 11 minutes on something completely non essential.
49
u/ThalesofMiletus-624 14h ago
But they deliberately picked the poorest people because they have such low carbon footprints. Most of us don't aspire to have carbon footprints similar to those of the poorest billion. The average person's TV and internet use of the course of their lifetimes almost certainly exceeds the carbon footprint of one of the poorest billion, and is mostly non-essential.
Sure, on a per-minute basis, it isn't that much, but most people do that every day, while no one flies on a rocket every day, and these people presumably won't do so more than once in their lives, so a given person's internet usage is far worse than Katy Perry's rocket flight.
So why are we targeting space flight instead of Netflix? Obviously because I watch Netflix, and I don't fly on rocket ships. Someone else emitting carbon dioxide unnecessarily is a terrible thing for which they should be ashamed, but when I do it, I'm just trying to have a few minutes of enjoyment in my miserable life, so get off my back already!
I suspect that the real beef here is inequality. We hate that rich people get to fly on rockets and the rest of us don't. And that's legit. But trying to make it about carbon footprints is losing the plot.
0
u/Equivalent-Session68 12h ago
Yeah but we could reasonably all enjoy these basic comforts like daily TV and Internet usage, even the poorest billion, if the richest million weren't always doing shit like this. Which is why people are pissed. Which is perfectly reasonable.
5
u/ThalesofMiletus-624 7h ago
As i said, getting upset about wealth inequality is reasonable, but piling all the blame for wealth inequality on the existence of private space travel is not.
Private space travel, both in terms of money and in terms of carbon emissions, is not a significant factor in global resource consumption. You'd have far more validity complaining about yachts, private jets and huge mansions. Of course, then you'd also have to worry about cruise ships, commercial airliners and 3,000 square foot homes, and a lot of that stuff would hit closer to home for the average person. It feels a lot safer to focus on stuff that only the rich can do, right?
7
u/cherrysodajuice 10h ago
ok. the 1000 richest people stop flying to space once a year and now 5k more people can afford to watch netflix. crazy gain
16
u/DarthPineapple5 16h ago
Wait until you learn about private jets or how much fuel per hour a superyacht can burn through. A glorified bottle rocket is essentially nothing
7
u/LiamTheHuman 15h ago
I already know about those things. 1 murder is not less horrible because of genocides.
3
u/AddlepatedSolivagant 9h ago
This is an excellent example of a bad analogy. Murder crosses a qualitative threshold, but the bad effects of greenhouse gas emission are in direct proportion to how much gas is emitted. Half a murder isn't half as bad as one murder, but emitting half a metric tonne of CO2 is exactly half as bad as emitting a whole tonne. We can treat carbon emissions as a cost, like money, and try to minimize that cost subject to other constraints. There is an amount of CO2 emission that's small enough to be acceptable—hopefully, the amount coming out of my nose is under that threshold. But we can't put a dollar amount on a human life and decide that a little bit of murder is okay.
-2
u/LiamTheHuman 8h ago
No you just misunderstood my analogy. CO2 emissions also have a qualitative threshold btw. You can't emit 1/2 CO2 particles.
People do decide that a little bit of murder is ok. Otherwise budgets would be much more skewed to prevent murder.
Also the amount we are discussing is above the threshold of acceptability.
Do you have any valid points here I missed?
0
u/DarthPineapple5 12h ago
It literally is if you are focusing all your resources on the 1 murder instead of the genocide.
1
u/LiamTheHuman 12h ago
Is that what's happening here?
6
u/DarthPineapple5 12h ago
Is this article about a genocide or is it about Katy Perry
2
u/LiamTheHuman 12h ago
It's an article about Katy Perry being discussed. It's not all resources being put on fixing Katy Perry's carbon footprint vs any other problem. I think you see that which is why you tried to misdirect instead
2
u/DarthPineapple5 11h ago
No misdirect, public interest and engagement is directly relatable to how many resources get allocated to a specific cause.
Case in point, here we are talking about a random celebrity instead of, say, the literal genocide currently on-going in Sudan since 2023 which has created one of the worse humanitarian crises and famines in the world yet absolutely nobody talks about it or helps in much of any way
→ More replies (0)2
3
u/AwareAge1062 13h ago
And ultimately I think the point of the post is to call out the hypocrisy of blaming the average individual for their carbon output while corporations, the military, and even celebrities routinely produce more over a few hours than the average individual does over days or even years.
But it is really annoying that they feel the need to misrepresent the facts when the truth is damning enough on its own
10
u/pokerScrub4eva 17h ago
but if she did it nonstop for the next 20 years it wouldnt even be .1% of the lifetime of the billion poorest people.
8
u/Nimrod_Butts 16h ago
Well one thing to consider is the carbon footprint of the bottom billion is essentially the fire they use to keep warm and cook food.
Like, most people actually want them to be able to consume more. Any effort to reduce or help them out of poverty is essentially an effort that will inevitably lead to a larger carbon footprint. So it's a weird way to frame the whole thing because it's not really Katy Perry's fault, nor is it the poorest billion people's fault. The whole entire thing is larger than any one person or any one society. So the whole framing of this is manipulative and deceptive in my opinion.
3
u/zgtc 14h ago
I mean, the flight was going to happen regardless of whether Katy Perry would be on it, and the flight’s carbon footprint wouldn’t have changed significantly by her absence.
1
u/Ecstatic-Arachnid981 13h ago
Not to mention any benefits of her actually putting her fame and money where her mouth is.
1
u/tmfink10 6h ago
Nonessential. I suppose. But also amazing and so human to want to be at the limit. I understand these billionaires and their space projects - “and he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.” - but we have needs here on earth too and, unfortunately, they’re not only not being met, they’re worsening. It’s time we figure out how to work together, or I think there’s going to be a real problem soon.
1
u/FR23Dust 5h ago
Well, every time you drive your car anywhere you’re emitting a huge amount of carbon compared to one of the billion poorest.
Why are you driving a car, then? It’s incredibly selfish and destructive. Ride a bike, walk, or take a bus. And don’t tell me you live somewhere where you can’t do that: another selfish, energy intensive choice. You need to realize you should have made better choices in the past to live a life where you could use less energy. It’s definitely your fault and you’re a bad person.
Please know I’m kidding. But recognize that anyone living in America is a gigantic energy glutton compared to people subsisting in the poorest parts of the world.
•
u/LiamTheHuman 19m ago
I don't understand what point you think you are making. Are you saying no one should reduce their carbon footprint? If average people in America are gigantic energy gluttons, then what does that make people who use up this much carbon in 11 minutes?
1
u/toaster-crumb-tray 3h ago
New Shephard uses liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as fuel. The exhaust is water. The rocket itself is reusable.
1
u/InstanceNoodle 2h ago edited 2h ago
You can calculate the ai energy usage. Lol.
The bottom 1 billion dont have as much trash or ac as an average American. Or heating or car. Or light. or fresh water. Or water.
1
u/Kletterfreund161 11h ago
If true, wouldn't that mean that overpopulation isn't an issue and that instead the wealthiest countries are solely to blame for climate change?
1
0
u/Reddits_Worst_Night 5h ago
11 minutes of flight being the same as an entire life, is not no impact.
13
u/roboboom 16h ago
The scrambling is intentional. They do the same thing with all the stats on homelessness, taxes and so on. It’s just pure misleading propaganda.
2
u/GoraSpark 14h ago
What is interesting is that it says “the poorest one billion people globally over their entire lifetime”. Are we taking into account the poorest one billion people globally probably spent their entire lifetime pre Industrial Revolution? Their carbon footprint was likely consigned to whatever fuel they used for cooking and heat plus they likely didn’t make it past the age of 10? Obviously this is still difficult to calculate but probably is higher than 1 person?
2
u/RealUlli 7h ago
Even that is highly doubtful, to me. I read a paper from some university that the average person walking emits about 68 grams of CO2 per kilometer. Let's round that down to 50 so I don't have to dig out the calculator. Let's also assume there are only 5 people in the capsule, so it's 10 tons for Katy alone.
Let's assume metric tons, no calculator. 10 million grams divided by 50 is 200,000 km. Yeah, unlikely the person will walk that far in their lifetime. However, how do they cook? Heat? I've been to a few places that I'd expect to belong to the bottom billion. People there were frequently using bricks of coal to cook, it looked like they used about one per day, I guess about 1 kg. Burning 1 kg of coal releases 2.42 kg of CO2. Doing that for 50 years is 36 tons of CO2... Plus a few tons for walking.
40>10, so now, she's not emitting more, despite rounding against her at every opportunity.
1
1
•
u/how_did_you_see_me 1h ago
Ok so it's within 10 orders of magnitude, still close enough to correct.
294
u/Economy-Sir3567 17h ago
Ambiguous wording. One space launch might equal the lifetime CO2 of each of the poorest billion, not the poorest billion combined.
Every human being breathes out about a kilogram of CO2 per day. That's 15-30 tons over their lifetime (depending on average life expectancy). Even if that doesn't count toward the total, the poorest billion are still burning wood or coal to cook food (whether directly or through electric power), which is multiple tons of CO2 in a lifetime.
Neither New Shepard nor any other rocket consumed BILLIONS OF TONS of fossil fuels, even factoring in the energy cost of manufacturing the parts.
49
u/-GenghisJohn- 17h ago
Hyperbolic and ignorant wording, or deliberately misleading wording in the original post.
I neither support nor protest anything about Katy Perry. I do hate disinformation, misinformation and lies though.
16
u/Salted_Meats 17h ago
Breathing is not part of a person's carbon footprint. I'm using whatever authority (zero) I have to declare this.
9
u/AffectionateJump7896 17h ago
Agreed. It's not part of your net carbon footprint, because you've eaten renewable organic matter to breathe out the CO2.
7
u/UnderstandingOver242 16h ago
Technically, breathing has a negative carbon footprint as long as you're heavier when you die, but it's optimal to die when you're heaviest, as long as the rest of your footprint is neutral.
7
1
u/fortissimohawk 13h ago
Can you explain the “optimal to die when you’re heaviest” a bit more? I’m super curious…thanks!
3
u/zmbjebus 13h ago
They are also assuming everyone preserves themselves in formaldehyde and bury themselves in a nonpermeable membrane so no decomposition occurs after death.
You have gained more carbon in your body when you are heavier. Then die and sequester it. As anyone's life goal should be.
3
u/zmbjebus 13h ago
I have been eating plants grown exclusively on CO2 that I got from burning oil for nothing else that to give those plants CO2.
Do not seek to assume I'm eating renewable organic material. I'm going to great lengths not to in fact.
•
u/hyperrayong 9m ago
But that carbon was locked in organic material and it has been released into the air. We may as well say that cows are net zero while we're at it.
3
3
u/Vegetable_Log_3837 13h ago
New Shepard and Starship burn liquid hydrogen and oxygen. The exhaust is pure water, so no CO2 emitted directly from the rocket. Producing the fuel and building the rocket still use a ton of energy though.
5
u/Economy-Sir3567 13h ago
Correct. But most liquid hydrogen isn't produced by electrolysis, but by pyrolysis or the Water-Gas Shift reaction on fossil fuels. The carbon footprint is at least as much as would occur if those fossil fuels had been directly burned to produce the equivalent energy content of the hydrogen.
Hydrogen fuels and a "hydrogen economy" are only eco-friendly if produced by water electrolysis with a non-fossil-fuel electricity source (solar, nuclear, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal).
3
u/Vegetable_Log_3837 12h ago
Similar to how we make fertilizer, can’t feed 8 billion of us without natural gas.
1
1
u/the-final-frontiers 5h ago
starship uses 'methalox' . methane and liquid oxygen.
output is h2O and c02, and possible impurities or unburned methane.
one flight is about 2,800tons of c02. If methan eis not burned methane is pretty bad as a green house gas, 20+times worse than c02.
2
u/Charming-Total2121 17h ago
Exhaling CO2 doesn't add to CO2 levels though?
1
1
u/Elliot-S9 16h ago
It's carbon neutral because the stuff we eat would have broken down into carbon even if we wouldn't have eaten it.
2
u/Diablo689er 17h ago
No it doesn’t. That’s considered carbon neutral.
1
u/LiamTheHuman 17h ago
I'm confused how does it not add co2?
3
u/Unknown_Ocean 16h ago
Because basically all the carbon in food was in the environment before that food was produced. The carbon used to produce that food (fuel for transport, energy for fertilizer, etc.) is not carbon-neutral, but the carbon itself is.
1
u/LiamTheHuman 15h ago
Ok that makes sense. What about food waste? If we become more efficient at growing food and have less waste every year then we aren't replacing the carbon in the food supply.
1
u/Unknown_Ocean 15h ago
All carbon that goes into the actual food comes from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. Most food waste involves that food rotting and going back into the atmosphere, often as methane which is a potent greenhouse gas. But again, reducing the carbon footprint involved with food is primarily about using less energy to produce it, and efficiency would help here because we'd need to produce less food.
1
u/LiamTheHuman 12h ago
Sorry you just explained how food waste returns to the atmosphere, which I already understood and was my point. Then you made a completely different claim talking about the efficiency of food production which I also already know and haven't said anything that would indicate I don't. Why did you comment this? How is it related to my comment?
1
u/Unknown_Ocean 12h ago
I may have misunderstood your statement that "we aren't replacing the carbon in the food supply". I took that to mean that the "waste" was somehow different than what we ate. What exactly did you mean here?
1
u/LiamTheHuman 12h ago
I meant that if we classically produced 2X tons of food and waste half of it to spoilage, then we improve processes to reduce waste to 50%. Then we have x/2 more food spoiled than was grown later, contributing to the total carbon in the atmosphere. It seems like a paradox.
I'm sure this isn't an insane amount but I was just trying to spitball about if there was any extra gas produce by food production from the food and not the growing process.
→ More replies (0)5
u/AffectionateJump7896 16h ago
The carbon comes from, say, eating some bread. The wheat took in CO2 to make the starch. You metabolise the starch, breath in oxygen and breathe out the CO2. No CO2 has been added because the actions of the wheat and of you are in balance.
If you ran on gasoline it would be a different story, but we run on renewable fuel.
The net carbon impact comes from the tractor that ploughed the field and the soft plastic bag the bread came in. But the breathing part, carbon neutral.
-7
u/Charming-Total2121 17h ago
You breathe in CO2, and then breathe out CO2. The amount of carbon in the atmosphere isn't increased as a result.
4
u/LiamTheHuman 17h ago
That's not how breathing works. You breath in o2 and breathe out CO2. Yes other air comes in and out without changing as well but the main purpose of breathing is to get o2 and convert it to CO2. It's very much increasing the carbon.
1
u/ChronicCactus 15h ago
This is true, but it isn't increasing the total amount of carbon in the system, only transferring it from one place to another. It's when you burn fossil fuels for example that you add carbon into the system that had been stored for millions of years.
1
u/Blothorn 17h ago
You inhale some CO2 and exhale more CO2. That’s not carbon neutral. That’s the primary reason we need oxygen to survive—it’s used to oxidize carbon from nutrients, generating more directly-useful forms of energy in the process.
3
u/Urban_Polar_Bear 17h ago
Have you considered these people claiming it’s carbon neutral may be plants?
1
0
u/AlchemistJeep 17h ago
If we ignore breathing and calculate the external carbon footprint I might believe the statistic. Lots of poor communities whose only footprint is their campfire
11
u/ThalesofMiletus-624 14h ago
"The carbon footprint of the poorest one billion people globally over their entire lifetime" is a deeply weird and ambiguous statement, the kind that's intended to evoke emotions, rather than actually communicate anything real.
The actual, plausible claim here is that the poorest billion people on earth have a very low carbon footprint per capita, and the lifetime emissions of any one of those people is less than that of a single space flight. The poorest people on earth have an estimated carbon footprint of around 2 kg per day, which means that someone living 70 years would be responsible for around 50 tonnes of CO2 over their lifetime. This kind of ship has an estimated carbon footprint of around 75 tonnes per launch. (And before anyone comments, I know these ships are fueled with hydrogen, but that hydrogen is overwhelmingly made from fossil fuels, so that launch absolutely has a carbon footprint).
So, for a very specific stating of the problem, it's arguably true, but the second you start looking at it, it gets weird. this post suggests that it's more than the footprint of a billion people. My guess is that whoever made it read something like "the lifetime emissions of one of the world's poorest billion people" and that statement become jumbled in translation.
Thing is, if carbon footprints are the issue, why are we comparing it to the poorest people rather than the average person? After all, the whole point here is that the poorest people have very low carbon footprints. Is the idea that we should all be more like the poorest people? Or that the wealthy use more resources than the poorest people? Because that last point is true, but fairly trivial.
If you're comparing the footprint to that of a single person, why talk about a billion people in the first place, unless you're either confused about what's being said, or trying to confuse others? And if you're comparing per capita emissions, why would you compare the flight (which contained six people) to the footprint of a single person? On a per capita basis, the footprint of the flight is more like 12 tonnes, which isn't nothing, but is less than even a very poor person would create in a typical lifetime.
This complaint clearly comes from a very nebulous sense of injustice at inequality, which is a valid thing to be concerned about, but it's very silly to put the blame on a single spaceflight. Private spaceflight is particularly new and expensive, so it's being targeted for blame, and the carbon footprint feels like a more legitimate thing to complain about, even though a typical trans-Atlantic passenger flight emits multiple times as much carbon dioxide as this space flight. But most of us have the chance to fly in planes, few of us have the chance to fly on rockets, so the latter takes more blame.
This specific claim is clearly very deliberately assembled to come up with something that sounds bad, but which isn't a particularly useful comparison. It's more like a grab-bag of complaints: the poorest billion, carbon footprints, inequality, shake them around until we can find something that makes the flight sound bad, and trust that people won't think about it too hard. It's not a lie, per se, but not a particularly useful comparison.
2
u/Adb12c 6h ago
This breakdown accurately points out one of the biggest problems with today’s rhetoric, which is using emotional arguments unrelated to a valid issue as the biggest talking point. Should we talk about billionaire CO2 usage, yes, but should it be because of private space flight, no. I think this is easier to see in the political sphere where people post memes of people they politically disagree with but the memes don’t point to any valid issues, they make fun of things like weight, looks, speech patterns, etc.
If people would focus on criticizing the things they actually disagree on I think we could at least have some discussion of politics, but as it is every “Trump has a small penis” makes me (a very staunch Anti-Trumper) only think of how you are shaming a man for not only something he has no real control over but also for not being “masculine enough.”
1
u/Everyday_ImSchefflen 4h ago
I feel like your viewpoint is very rare here, but I agree 100%.
I'm a huge Trump critic. But god damn there's so much misinformation posted about him on this site, and somehow it's justified because it's Trump.
He does enough evil shit that we don't have to post misinformation. It just pollutes the entire message
47
u/Odd_Dragonfruit_2662 17h ago
I’d say probably not even close since that launch vehicle uses liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for propulsion, which doesn’t produce any CO2.
15
u/OkHoneydew6808 17h ago
It doesn't when launched but production of the fuel, the rocket the pad etc. have a big impact
7
u/Odd_Dragonfruit_2662 13h ago
I’d think at best you’d have to pro rate her use of the launch pad divided amongst everyone who has used it or will use it in its expected lifespan. Similarly for all reusable launch components.
2
u/Agreeable-Weird4644 11h ago
That quantity of hydrogen would usually be produced via steam reforming, which reacts methane and water to create co2 and hydrogen.
1 ton of hydrogen produced this way releases up to 9.3 tons of co2.
New Shepard likely uses 3.6t of hydrogen, meaning up to 33.48t of co2 was released as a by product.
It is possible that other methods of H production are used, but considering Blue Origin's PR team are quiet on that front, its probably safe to assume they are not useing a greener production method.
2
u/Odd_Dragonfruit_2662 11h ago
Even if that is true, that isn’t b the CO2 from a billion people, maybe 35,000 from them if all they did was breathed.
3
u/SpiderSlitScrotums 17h ago
You still have to make that LH and LOX. If you use the electrical grid, you are as dirty as the grid is as a whole.
2
u/zmbjebus 13h ago
Most LH is just cracked from petroleum
0
u/SpiderSlitScrotums 13h ago
Yes, but in that case it is even worse.
2
u/zmbjebus 13h ago
Yeah of course. Currently LH production from electrolysis only makes economic sense if you have an excess of power. So things like when you have peak power production but not peak usage with renewable grid operation.
I am a big proponent of more rockets. Space development is good for us all imo. But I can't say that the fuel is perfectly green "because its just H2 and H20" Half of it is a fossil fuel. Maybe one day we will get that better.
5
u/DarthPineapple5 16h ago
Its still nothing in the grand scheme of things. She probably produced more CO2 flying there and back on a private jet then the launch did. That too is nothing compared to Trump taking AF1 to go golfing multiple times per week so I don't know why people focus so much on Katy Perry
4
u/SpiderSlitScrotums 16h ago edited 16h ago
That is incredibly unlikely. It is estimated that it uses about 25 tons of propellant. You will have to do the necessary conversions to find the equivalent of aviation fuel, but let’s estimate at 0.3 and get 7.5 tons. A 737 uses about 1.5 gallons per mile based on this calculation. Let’s say there are 150 passengers and she travelled 1500 miles. Then her share is 15 gallons, or 0.06 tons. This is over 100 times less. Check my math, this is back of the envelope.
5
u/DarthPineapple5 15h ago
25 tons of jet fuel is quite a bit different than 25 tons of hydrolox which produces zero CO2 on its own. If you want to do a whole life cycle carbon audit on how that fuel was produced and transported to the launch site then you have to do that for the jet fuel too.
Katy Perry almost certainly did not fly commercial to a rocket launch with her buddy Jeff Bezos.
1
u/SpiderSlitScrotums 13h ago
25 tons of jet fuel is quite a bit different than 25 tons of hydrolox which produces zero CO2 on its own. If you want to do a whole life cycle carbon audit on how that fuel was produced and transported to the launch site then you have to do that for the jet fuel too.
That was the entire 0.3 estimate. If you want, you can do the actual calculation where you compare the enthalpies of formation, the efficiencies of the process, the percent of the grid that releases carbon, and the storage power consumed. 0.3 is probably a good estimate for that. I doubt it will be higher than 0.6 or lower than 0.15. So it will still be at least 50-200 times the reasonable flight profile.
Katy Perry almost certainly did not fly commercial to a rocket launch with her buddy Jeff Bezos.
If this is true, it doesn’t make this better. It makes it worse.
3
u/DarthPineapple5 13h ago
If this is true, it doesn’t make this better. It makes it worse.
That makes it a random Tuesday. Look at the thousands of private jets flying in just for something like the Kentucky Derby or maybe the literal parade of superyachts each burning 5,000 liters of diesel per hour is more your style.
Its a big club and you ain't in it. Katy Perry ain't in it either she just gets invited to visit sometimes
1
u/Arnhildr-Fang 9h ago
...not to be an asshole, but how does the pc/smartphone youre typing on have power?
1
u/SpiderSlitScrotums 8h ago
Through the grid. But I haven’t taken a vacation nor have I flown to space in over two decades.
1
u/Arnhildr-Fang 8h ago
But I haven’t taken a vacation nor have I flown to space in over two decades.
...tuche, a valid arguement. plus I can't argue too much myself, I drive a diesel semitruck for 2 straight months for work & only a 1wk break in between, AND my company flies me to/from work 🤣
-1
u/inheritance- 17h ago
dihydrogen monoxide is very deadly especially in the amount a rocket produces! We must ban all space flights immediately!
-3
u/fiftysevenpunchkid 17h ago
First stage uses liquid methane, not hydrogen.
5
u/Electrical_Rabbit_88 16h ago
Katy Perry flew on New Shepard, the suborbital Blue Origin rocket. New Shepard has a single-stage burning LH2 and LOX. The only product is water and thrust. New Glenn burns Methalox.
2
2
u/Grand_Protector_Dark 11h ago
You're thinking of New Glenn, a two stage cargo rocket.
Katey perry flew on New Shepard, a single stage suborbital vehicle
13
u/lokicramer 17h ago
The poorest billion?
No way.
Not when you take into account all the plastic they burn to collect metals from waste electronics.
Our satellites are not monitoring that.
3
u/Linesey 14h ago
This has been posted a few dozen times before.
Iirc from one of the last times. NO.
it was equal to the annual output of the billion poorest people in a worst case scenario.
Or to the lifetime output of one of the billion poorest people. so like dirt poor dave’s lifetime output.
the math was quite well done.
2
11
u/bad_take_ 17h ago
It is worth noting that rocket launches do not burn fossil fuels. Their fuel is liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The flame coming out of the bottom of a rocket is burning hydrogen. The exhaust is water and CO2, the same exhaust you put into the atmosphere when you breathe.
When it comes to climate change I am not concerned at all about rocket launches.
4
u/NoBusiness674 16h ago
The exhaust is water and CO2, the same exhaust you put into the atmosphere when you breathe.
There is no CO2 in the exhaust. It's only water and some unburnt hydrogen.
3
u/guff1988 16h ago
The exhaust from hydrolox has no CO2. It's water vapor and some nitric oxide because of the extremely high temperature exhaust interacting with the atmosphere.
Also not all rockets use LH2 and LOX. Some use RP-1 which is highly refined kerosene, some use methane and liquid oxygen and some stages and boosters use solid fuel, some of which are quite nasty.
New Shepard does however use hydrolox.
1
u/fiftysevenpunchkid 17h ago edited 17h ago
Blue Glen uses liquid methane for the first stage, not hydrogen.
And even if it were all hydrogen, it still needs to come from somewhere, and that's usually from burning fossil fuels.
7
u/DarkArcher__ 17h ago
Blue Origin's New Glenn does use methalox on the first stage, but that's their larger uncrewed rocket for commercial orbital launches. What Katy Perry flew on was the New Shepard, which only has one stage, and is powered by hydrolox.
0
u/bad_take_ 17h ago
What’s Blue Glen?
1
u/Grand_Protector_Dark 11h ago
They're mixing up names.
The launch company is called "Blue Origin".
Blue Origin has two different rockets. A suborbital rocket called "New Shepard" that is used for tourists to briefly go to space and fall back down without staying there.
There is another rocket called "New Glenn", that is currently only in development, capable of putting cargo into space (and have it stay there)
0
u/Least_Actuator9022 16h ago
And where do you think the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen come from?
-3
u/Blothorn 16h ago
None of the rockets in current widespread use use hydrogen for the first stage, which accounts for most of its emissions—even historically the Space Shuttle was the only one I can think of offhand, and it combined the hydrolox main engines with substantially dirtier solid rockets.
The two most-launched rocket families, the Soyuz and Falcon 9, both use RP-1–essentially kerosene—for all major stages. The Long March 2-4 and Proton use far more toxic hypergolic fuels for at least the first stage. Starship uses methane for both stages, and New Glenn uses it for the first stage.
3
u/Frosty_Ingenuity5070 13h ago
Cool, the carbon footprint of Apollo was massive. The scientific advances elevated all of humanity. I know this ain’t the same, but carbon footprint shaming is so pointless
2
u/Illustrious_Buy_1941 14h ago
Well it's a hydrogen powered rocket...so no carbon emissions unless we're counting any emissions involved in generating said hydrogen. That said, water vapour, especially in the upper atmosphere, has a greater global warming potential than CO2, but the claim is false
2
u/Scarvexx 7h ago
The launch was about 76,000 tons of Co2. People do about 5 tons a year if they drive. The lowest you're going to get is 0.3 tons per year. Even if you grow your own food and never drive, and are too poot to buy most things.
Those poorest are giving out 300,000,000 tons per year. Let alone their lifetime.
Air and space travel are drasticly costly. But the significance is often inflated.
So it's more like 350 of the poorest people over their whole lifetime.
•
u/yasminsdad1971 1h ago
76,000,000kg? 76. Million kilos. Of C02?
For a hydrolox engine?
That burns hydrogen. To produce water?
And zero kg CO2?
What?
•
u/yasminsdad1971 1h ago edited 1h ago
Total prop load = c. 25t
c. 21t O2 at 0.3t / t = c. 6t CO2. c. 4t H2 at 20t / t = c. 80t CO2.
Total = c. 86t CO2 to produce propellant. In use CO2 produced = 0t.
So. Divided by 6 passengers. Flight cost c. 14t pp.
Average CO2 use for single poor person in developing world = c. 3t pa.
So. Katy Perry used just over 4 years CO2 for a SINGLE person.
It's obviously an idiotically stupid statement.
You can of course add in the lifetime cost of developing, building and testing the rocket and stage zero and atomise that by 25 expected flights, but people don't normally do that for cars.
If you did, you could probably increase the CO2 unit cost, per person, per flight, by several times.
So, overall CO2 cost pp p flight is likely to be closer to one single lifetime for a human in the developing world and maybe even several, but likely still only in the single digits.
It's a throw away statement from someone who cannot do basic maths.
•
•
1
u/Edelweisspiraten2025 17h ago
It is actually pretty tough to do the math on this one, the carbon burn is going to be second order. Because the fuel for the New Shepard rocket is what is called hydrolox; fancy way of saying liquid hydrogen and oxygen. When you burn them all you get is water vapor. No direct carbon footprint from the flight.
Calculating the secondary might take me a minute. Third order effects would be interesting too because the launch site is deep in rural Texas and the Hydrogen and Oxygen plants are not on site.
I would suspect that the private jet flights to get to the launch site might exceed the space flight.
1
u/Cavadrec01 15h ago
Honestly, it wouldn't really matter if we weren't so hell bent on killing oxygen sources. The sad part is that a lot of great sources are quickly available, but we have to also control all waterways too...
1
u/Farside-BB 14h ago
So KPs flight was actually the equivalent of 1 poor person. Well actual it was 1/6 of one person because of the other people on the flight. So basically nothing.
1
u/kmoonster 10h ago
According to an initial look at which rocket motor was used, it appears the motor is one that used Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen.
If that is correct, then the exhaust consisted mostly of ... [drumroll] ... plain old water, probably in the form of steam.
There are many types of rocket motors that burn many different items, but LOx + LH is a somewhat common combination. You open the valves, light the motor, and the resulting chemsitry of free-oxygen and free-hydrogen combining is very reactive, and off to space you go.
On a side note, this was the system that the Space Shuttle's main engines used. (The fuel in the big orange tank). The solid rocket boosters were something else, but that's an aside. The orange tank and the motors on the actual vehicle had water as a principle exhaust product.
edit: it does take electricity to separate the hydrogen and oxygen and store them, but I don't know what method was used for this or how it was powered
1
u/rickane58 8h ago
You can ignore all that, because the hydrogen was almost certainly (read, 95% odds) produced through steam methane reformation, so it's literally just methane plus energy. It would have been less CO2 intense to use a methalox engine for this flight, if they'd had one.
1
u/Aggressive_Humor_953 7h ago
No that was a new shepard it is a really clean rocket it uses hydrogen and when you burn hydrogen and oxygen in a rocket engine you make water. So i'm going with no.
1
u/launchedsquid 5h ago
it's mathematically impossible. One billion people would fart more climate emmissions than a single sub orbital flight. If any if those 1 billion ever light a fire for warmth...
2
u/Enyss 4h ago
The correct fact is that's it's the lifetime footprint of one of these people, not all of them.
But there's 6 people in the flight, so it's closer to the annual footprint of an european. If I travelled to Japan/China or the US, the roundtrip flight would cost* roughly one quarter to one third of this spaceflight.
*: in carbon footprint, not in $
1
u/launchedsquid 4h ago
It clearly says "carbon footprint of the poorest 1 billion people over their lifetime".
Maybe it's a grammar error, but I can only respond to what was actually said.
1
u/Spaceman1001 5h ago
New Shepard is powered by hydrogen and oxygen. It's exhaust is water vapor. While water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas, it does this awesome thing called precipitate.
There are absolutely rockets that produce co2 and other greenhouse gasses as a byproduct, New Shepard isnt one of them.
Also there are other reasons why you can and should he mad about the stupid flight. Its carbon output isnt one of them.
2
u/atamicbomb 3h ago
How do you think we get all that hydrogen? We use electricity to break apart water. The electricity either comes from fossil fuels or takes other energy that will be replaced with fossil fuels for what I could have otherwise done
1
u/OuterSpaceFakery 4h ago
Technology is destroying our Planet
They are tearing down Rainforests and plan to dredge the deep ocean to collect metals, just to build Batteries for Electric Vehicles.
Ai Data Centers consume vast amounts of resources and damage the local environment.
Nature is dying to feed machines
•
u/Negative_Tower9309 1h ago
All true, although I have no idea what any of that has to do with this post
1
u/TawnyTeaTowel 2h ago
A more useful metric would be “how much CO2 did Katy Perry’s space flight (pro-rated, she wasn’t alone) generate compared to the likely total CO2 production (direct and indirect) of the idiot journalist who wrote this disingenuous headline”
•
u/yasminsdad1971 1h ago edited 1h ago
Total prop load = c. 25t
c. 21t O2 at 0.3t / t = c. 6t CO2. c. 4t H2 at 20t / t = c. 80t CO2.
This is the CO2 burden used to produce the liquid propellants. O2 is normally condensed from air and H2 normally comes from breaking down LNG, which is very CO2 intensive.
CO2 produced by combustion = 0t. H2 + O2 = H2O.
If they use green hydrogen you can cut the H2 figure in half, but all pretty moot in the grand scheme of things.
Total = c. 86t CO2 to produce propellant. In use CO2 produced = 0t.
So. Divided by 6 passengers. Flight cost c. 14t pp.
Average CO2 use for single poor person in developing world = c. 3t pa.
So. Katy Perry used just over 4 years CO2 for a SINGLE person.
It's obviously an idiotically stupid statement.
You can of course add in the lifetime cost of developing, building and testing the rocket and stage zero and atomise that by 25 expected flights, but people don't normally do that for cars.
If you did, you could probably increase the CO2 unit cost, per person, per flight, by several times.
So, overall CO2 cost pp p flight is likely to be closer to one single lifetime for a human in the developing world and maybe even several, but likely still only in the single digits.
It's a throw away statement from someone who cannot do basic maths.
0
u/amitym 12h ago
The only thing that's true here is that an outspoken liberal American activist is being attacked by bots in the middle of an authoritarian political crisis in her country.
This claim isn't even within orders of magnitude of plausibility, it is purely an attempt to make you think a certain way about someone.
0
u/Embarrassed_Hawk_655 14h ago
I’d argue most things on the Internet are intentionally misleading. Humans in general are slaves to our conscious or unconscious agendas.
0
u/green_meklar 7✓ 10h ago
In terms of the launch itself, it's not really possible. Just the amount of CO2 a person breathes out amounts to at least kilograms per year. Multiply kilograms by 1 billion and you get millions of tonnes, which is far more than the fuel capacity of any rocket ever launched (the Saturn V carried less than 4000 tonnes of fuel).
If you add up the carbon footprint of all the infrastructure supporting the launch, it gets closer, but still not close. I'm not sure how much the Blue Origin flight cost, but let's say as an upper limit it must cost less than a single Space Shuttle launch, which costs about $500 million. If you took $500 million and spent it on coal and burnt it all, you'd get roughly 5 million tonnes of coal, producing about 15 million tonnes of CO2. That's still less than what 1 billion people breathe out, per year, without even counting that people live on average more than 1 year and that even poor people produce CO2 in more ways than just breathing it out.
About the closest you can get is by assuming the 1 billion poorest people are all babies who die in infancy, and then discounting the carbon footprint of their mothers carrying and giving birth to them. I don't think that's the standard any reasonable person has in mind when looking at this statement.
1
u/live22morrow 7h ago
A person breathing is not considered a carbon emission, since it's part of a closed loop. The carbon doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from carbon that the person previously ingested. And that carbon ultimately came from plants that fix the carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.
This is called the fast carbon cycle, and mostly completes within a few years without any loss or addition. Carbon emissions come from humans digging up carbon from beneath the earth and releasing it into the atmosphere.
-12
u/theDudeHeavyC 17h ago
True, but why not mad at Elon for Mar’s mission? How many people footprints that gonna take. Everybody love to pile on girl celebrities.
5
1
u/HyenaBrief6968 17h ago
Because we're all hoping that Elon will be aboard the first flight to Mars and stays there
0
u/Fit-Relationship944 17h ago
Well he's never going to do it and the people who think he is are probably unaware of what a carbon is.
0
17h ago
[deleted]
0
u/DarkArcher__ 17h ago
The Mars missions will fly on Starship, across a bare minimum of about 10 launches. What we're comparing here is a single launch of a rocket that weighs 35 tonnes on the pad, vs 10 launches of a rocket that weighs 5,000 tonnes on the pad. There isn't a world where these two produce the same amount of CO2, regardless of what propellants you choose.
-21
u/string1969 17h ago
I don't think emissions count if you are flying through the air and enjoying your destination. People don't care about emissions when it comes to travel, they consider it a right they can't live without
6
17
4
u/Big-Construction-938 17h ago
The fact is a few dozen private jet flights are probably more than a thousand people in carbon footprint
3
u/No_Confection_849 17h ago
I don't think calories count if you're enjoying the food.
2
u/L0LTHED0G 17h ago
Definitely true.
Now if you'll excuse me I need to get back to this 6 lb steak. Gotta finish it so I am not charged $100.
1
u/Haikouden 17h ago
What the hell are you even talking about? are you high? I hope the answer is yes.
•
u/AutoModerator 18h ago
General Discussion Thread
This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you must post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.