Saving The Earth From Rocket Exhaust

Thomas James beats the eternally clueless Bruce Gagnon with a heavy cluebat. One could say that he beats him senseless, but it’s so short a journey that it would be pointless.

It does bring to mind an interesting issue. If we do ever achieve the desideratum of low-cost, high-volume launch, will it become a significant contributor to atmospheric pollution? As Thomas points out, Jet A and oxygen overwhelm rocket exhaust by orders of magnitude, so it’s hard to imagine lox/RP, lox-hydrogen or even lox-methane as being a problem, but I can see a point at which solids might be banned (though I suspect that they’d have long before that point been eliminated as unsafe and uneconomical).