Transterrestrial Musings

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As much as I'd like to see hundreds of suborbital flights annually, I sure hope something ridiculous like this isn't the reason.

Posted by Stephen Kohls at March 7, 2007 11:27 AM

If governments are willing to pay for it, it's no worse than the other silly thing they waste money on.
It would be better than signing onto Draconian treaties.

Posted by B.Brewer at March 7, 2007 12:05 PM

The nutty professor is clearly not a global warming skeptic.

Posted by Toast_n_Tea at March 7, 2007 12:24 PM

Which is another reason why he is a nutty professor.

Posted by Jim Breeding at March 7, 2007 12:38 PM

Wouldn't there be, like, a health problem from eventually breathing all that sulfer? Or would it all stay up there like magic?

Posted by Bill Peschel at March 7, 2007 12:39 PM

I thought of that as well, at least regarding Greg Benford's similar suggestion. The problem is that you only need to go to about 80k feet, which is probably cheaper to do with airbreathers. You would also get the advantage of spreading your sulfer/dust/whatever over a wider area per flight.

Posted by sjv at March 7, 2007 12:44 PM

Wouldn't there be, like, a health problem from eventually breathing all that sulfer? Or would it all stay up there like magic?

Did you, like, read the article?

"Hydrocarbons are burnt to lift the rocket material, and the rocket then goes into the stratosphere. In the stratosphere, hydrogen sulphide is burnt, and the sulphate particles reflect solar radiation," he explains.

Emphasis mine.

The article goes on to admit that the true consequences are unknown, and that the solution still doesn't address carbon dioxide emissions.

The article fails to explain whether or not the 0.6 degree C change could be wholly attributed to the pinatubo eruption, given that it was only a drop for 2 years, and we have see fluctuations much larger over much shorter and longer periods of time. It's akin to saying that you can lose up to 6 pounds of weight in 2 weeks eating a given cereal, when you can fluctuate up to 6 pounds over the course of any given day anyway.

Posted by John Breen III at March 7, 2007 12:46 PM

If all you are doing is hurling sulfur you would be better off using an artillery gun with rocket assist, like the Navy is using these days.

Posted by Jardinero1 at March 7, 2007 12:47 PM

Hey, guys! Stop being sensible! Don't take away my market!

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 7, 2007 12:49 PM

Wouldn't adding all that sulfate to the atmosphere
cause dreadful acid rain or something?

-dw

Posted by dave w at March 7, 2007 01:09 PM

Wouldn't it be better to create some kind of launch rail and fire the stuff up (say going up a mountainside in Equador).

It's not as if sulphur needs safety tests or worries about g-forces. If such a rail was made it could be used later to fire up blocks of ice (always need water) or other bulk products. Having a load or two of Kerosine or whatever fuel fired up into LEO would certainly change some of the requirements for orbitals (replace heavy heat shields with the ability to tank up and properly break to shed speed).

Posted by rjschwarz at March 7, 2007 01:12 PM

Or balloons. IMHO JP Aerospace can already put stuff at the desired altitude for the price you cite, Rand.

Posted by Karl Hallowell at March 7, 2007 01:13 PM

If the sole aim is increasing particulate count, knocking that step off of all the coal-fired plants would meet the criteria. And it wouldn't cost more than a nominal retooling fee - the scrubbers are energy sinks. IOW: It would be profitable.

(Of course, it would also be insane, but that doesn't seem to be a criteria for this discussion :D)

Posted by Al at March 7, 2007 01:14 PM

I'm The Fellow at Free rrepublic pooh poohs it because it is Ca-Ca

Posted by Uncle peter at March 7, 2007 01:23 PM

I'm The Fellow at Free rrepublic pooh poohs it because it is Ca-Ca

Posted by Uncle peter at March 7, 2007 01:23 PM

Wouldn't it be better to create some kind of launch rail and fire the stuff up (say going up a mountainside in Equator).

We had a professor from University of Washington (I think) give a talk about this a few years back at our weekly seminar, he was proposing using a ram-jet-in-a-tube approach. He had done lab experiments with 0.50 cal bullets up to Mach 7. Not high enough for orbit, but impressive. Problem is that the aero heating in the lower atmosphere is ridiculous so it probably wouldn’t work.

I ask him what he would put in orbit that could survive those gs. He answered “I don’t know pea soup”. I love professors.

Posted by brian d at March 7, 2007 01:37 PM

Wow, that "Uncle Peter" guy at FR is way out of touch (even for Freepers). He's claiming there's only eight sites worldwide in which you can possibly launch rockets (and you would, of course, be able to launch a rocket only once a month, must be union rules). And the numbers are "daunting and unattainable" (italics in the original). He also complains about the "math".

Keep in mind that modern jetliners can reach the bottom of the region into which we're dumping this hypothetical sulfur. A 747-400 probably could have a payload on the order of 100-200 tons and flies up to around 40,000 feet (or almost 13km up, just inside the 10-40 km range). Something that requires the equivalent of 5,000 to 10,000 747 flights is not that big a deal. A single 747 could probably do at least 5 trips a day. That means one plane operating around the clock could dump a million tons of sulfur in six or less years. We'd want the sulfur to be released much higher, but this gives you an idea of how much effort it'd take.

You do the math. But it looks feasible to me.

Posted by Karl Hallowell at March 7, 2007 01:38 PM

The altitudes discussed (33,000-131,000 feet) are easily reached by jet aircraft or (at the upper end) weather balloons.

So, why use rockets? This is a BBC documentary ("Five Ways to Save the World") and the producers apparently wanted an exciting James Bond-style graphic.

It just goes to show you shouldn't believe everything you see on television.

Posted by Edward Wright at March 7, 2007 01:41 PM

Didn't the analysis at LLNL conclude that you could do much better than to use a dielectric like sulfuric acid? Small metallic scatterers or dye molecules (protected somehow from reaction with ozone) could potentially achieve the same scattering with much less mass.

Posted by Paul Dietz at March 7, 2007 01:52 PM

i wouldn't want to dispere acid with an aluminum aircraft

Posted by anonymous at March 7, 2007 02:02 PM

The key is increasing particulate count high enough up in the atmosphere for the sulfur to burn and stay up that high. Increasing the particulate count at ground level would only serve to increase acid rain.

Unless we're going to come up with a way to build 50,000+ foot high smokestacks...

Posted by John Breen III at March 7, 2007 02:28 PM

brian_d, I think the tube would have to be a vacuum and go up to fairly thin atmospheres to work. Even then it might be like hitting a wall when the object came out of the tube.

Still liquids could go up and liquids could be useful. Even pea-soup could probably be used as a propellant with the right kind of engine.

Posted by rjschwarz at March 7, 2007 03:08 PM

I'm surprised this came up at all. When I've quoted that same temp drop post the Pinatubo eruption, I've had several global warming Nazis fall on the ground and spew pea soup over my ignorance of "the real facts" about that event. Now one of them says use the "facts" I didn't understand.

Uh, huh, how 'bout those Mets?

Posted by Steve at March 7, 2007 04:58 PM

Um, this is a pretty old idea. It dates back at least to 1979 when Freeman Dyson proposed it.

I thought one of the ideas was to introduce the scattering particles as a jet fuel additive. Then the marginal delivery cost would be next to nothing. And those 'contrail' wackos would finally have something to be upset about.

Posted by ArtD0dger at March 7, 2007 05:43 PM

It's akin to saying that you can lose up to 6 pounds of weight in 2 weeks eating a given cereal, when you can fluctuate up to 6 pounds over the course of any given day anyway.

Yeah, but if every time you eat the cereal for two weeks, your weight drops by 6 pounds, then you've got cause and effect. Pinatubo is hardly the first volcano to be correlated with small worldwide temperature drops.

You're saying the measured effect might be smaller than the noise. That's what averaging is all about.

Posted by Carl Pham at March 7, 2007 06:10 PM

Sulfur makes Sulfuric Acid. Bad ju-ju for poorly buffered watersheds.

Posted by Mike Puckett at March 7, 2007 07:10 PM

I'd be willing to bet that if this idea was acted upon then gov't enterprise would kick in. They'd likely propose this efforts needs to be perfectly filled by a scramjet vehicle. Something that could skip across the upper layers of the stratosphere and disperse sulphides across a wide swath within an accelerated time frame. Yet would justify the expenditures already sunk into a research project that has yet to produce a market niche for itself.

Posted by Josh Reiter at March 7, 2007 08:25 PM

Sulfur makes Sulfuric Acid

Well, only in the sense that oxygen or hydrogen do, too. What you probably mean is that sulfates (SO4) make H2SO4 when they come in contact with water. This can't have escaped Crutzen's attention: he is, after all, a Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist.

I'm guessing there's not enough water in the stratosphere for this to be important, and that the SO4 degrades from UV radiation -- into what I don't know, atmospheric chemistry is very weird -- before it has a chance to get back to the troposphere and meet up with some water. I'm sure Crutzen has thought out the known decay schemes for the stuff, and indeed probably proposed sulfates because they are the least harmful. Why they're the least harmful I don't know.

Posted by Carl Pham at March 8, 2007 12:02 AM

I don't understand it really. Why don't we simply nuke a volcano, Bruce Willis style?

Posted by Adrasteia at March 8, 2007 01:33 AM

Regarding ramjet-in-a-tube (ram accelerator / ram cannon) propulsion, your UofW professor would have been either Carl Knowlen or Adam Bruckner. The "pea soup" payload proposal was obviously tongue in cheek -- if you could launch a lot of raw mass much more cheaply, you'd solve a lot of problems in space exploitation. As for anything more complex, well -- you'd be surprised how smart and mechanically involved you can make something, and still engineer it to be fired from standard artillery.

"Problem is that the aero heating in the lower atmosphere is ridiculous so it probably wouldn’t work."

A common objection, answered in two ways:

(1) Launch much higher than sea level, such as from (ironically enough) an extinct or dormant volcano. Even 14,000 feet gets a projectile past a lot of air molecules, at high density, that it would otherwise encounter at its maximum speed.

(2) ICBM nose-cones hit the lower atmosphere going pretty dang fast. Ablatives could help too.

The ram accelerator folk acknowledge that to reach orbit is to pay a significant mass penalty for heat shielding (maybe 20-30%?)

The Kyoto Protocol establishes markets based on GWPs (Global Warming Potentials), but unfortunately not for what might called Global Cooling Potentials. I fantasize that, in 2012, there will be some pressure to amend the treaty to include GCPs -- it could be the best thing that ever happened to commercial space development.

Posted by Michael Turner at March 8, 2007 02:06 AM

The article says that the consequences of injecting Sulfur as proposed are unknown. So maybe, contrary to Pham, the Professor doesn't know either, whether Nobel prize winner or not.

He just has a nutty idea on how to scratch his nose by wrapping his arm around his face instead of taking a more direct route to the booger. On the other hand this indirect route is clearly a lot more fun, especially for the observers here at TTM.

Posted by Offside at March 8, 2007 05:03 AM

Wouldn't it be a shame if we did this, and brought on an anthropogenic ice age?

Posted by McGehee at March 8, 2007 08:50 AM

Indeed. If I remember the KCRA-TV weatherman in Sacramento correctly, at 18,000 feet you're above about half the mass of the atmosphere.

Posted by McGehee at March 8, 2007 08:53 AM

The article says that the consequences of injecting Sulfur as proposed are unknown.

Oooo, riiiiight, I forgot. If an anonymous BBC journalist who certainly got a C in high-school chemistry, if he took it at all, since he makes at least two dumbass chemistry mistakes in the linked article, says that the consequences are completely unknown...well, it just must be true.

After all, the opinion of a liberal artsy math-is-hard scribbler who spends 15 minutes using "common sense" on the problem should count for just as much as the opinion of an MIT atmospheric scientist who's spent 15 years thinking about the problem, right? Feh.

Posted by Carl Pham at March 8, 2007 08:55 AM

That's the main reason I suggested building the thing in Equador (mangled the spelling). The capital is very high and would have airport facilities as well as nearby seacoast. It's very high up and near the equator and the Amazon forest is downrange in case we start dropping boxes of pea-soup by accident.

We're depending upon a foreign country which *could* be a huge drawback.

Posted by rjschwarz at March 8, 2007 09:59 AM

Carl, before you wax eloquent, multiple fonts and all, maligning the poor reporters math skills, perhaps a little reading is in order?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060804-global-warming.html

Hey, it happens to the best of us..;-)

Less pomposity, Carl.

Posted by Toast_n_Tea at March 8, 2007 03:04 PM

Oookay, TnT, I read the National Geographic article, and I fail to see entirely what you're getting at.

Aside from the reporter (again) cluelessly confusing sulfur itself with sulfates, the only statement I can find that is relevant is: "Crutzen admits that there is a risk of the sulfur becoming a health hazard if it rained back down on Earth."

This is a fairly content-free statement: are we talking about sulfur or sulfates, or some different sulfur-containing derivative that might be formed, if our understanding of stratochemistry is forked up? What does "rained back" mean, since there is, of course, no literal rain in the stratosphere? What kind of "health hazard"? Acid rain is not a health hazard (except to fish and plants and marble statuary). Are we talking about photochemical smog, maybe? God knows. And Crutzen, probably. But pretty clearly the reporter does not. She simply makes the vague (and hence impossible to contradict) statement that if things go wrong in unforeseen ways then unforeseen harm could occur. Well, duh.

So what's your point?

Posted by Carl Pham at March 8, 2007 11:58 PM

We're depending upon a foreign country which *could* be a huge drawback.

The solution is to never depend on *one* foreign country, but always have several paths to the same goal. In this case, Peru, Boliva, Columbia, and Chile may all have suitable locations. There may also be locations in Africa and New Guinea.

Posted by Karl Hallowell at March 9, 2007 11:24 AM

My point, Carl:

The referred to quote in the first article was :

"The article says that the consequences of injecting Sulfur as proposed are unknown."

In your post you attributed this to a stupid reporter's blabbing and tied it to your conjecture that these consequences had been explored by the Nobel prize winning Professor.

The NG article quotes the Professor as saying he isn't sure of the consequences:

"Crutzen admits that there is a risk of the sulfur becoming a health hazard if it rained back down on Earth."

So you have a direct quote vs. an unreferenced claim. This contradicts your assumption that he had fully thought through this, making your various slaps at the reporter and the other poster here unwarranted.

Posted by Toast_n_Tea at March 9, 2007 01:13 PM

Wouldn't it be simpler to just set off a bunch of nuclear bombs in a desert somwhere and induce a nuclear winter?

Posted by Ed Minchau at March 9, 2007 03:58 PM

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