Antinuclear

Australian news, and some related international items

INTERNATIONAL DARK SKY ASSOCIATION vs. FCC AND SPACEX

 https://cellphonetaskforce.org/astronomers-in-court-against-fcc-and-spacex/ Arthur Firstenberg, 1 May 24

On December 29, 2022, the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) sued the U.S. Federal Communications Commission over its decision to approve SpaceX’s application for up to 30,000 more low-orbit satellites, in addition to the 12,000 already approved and in process of filling our skies. This is Case No. 22-1337 before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and has not yet been decided by the court.

American plasma physicist Sierra Solter implored the FCC to “please save our night sky… Please, please, don’t take away my stars. To feel that my place of comfort and calm — a starry sky — is being taken away and given to billionaires is suffocating.”

On December 18, 2023, Ms. Solter published a scientific article detailing her fear for our planet. Each of the 42,000 planned Starlink satellites, she wrote, has a design lifespan of only 5 years, after which it will be de-orbited, burned up in the atmosphere, and replaced.  She calculated that this will require 23 satellites per day — each the size of an SUV or truck — to be burned up in the atmosphere forever into the future, leaving an enormous amount of toxic chemicals and metallic dust to accumulate in the air we breathe and in the ionosphere

This is already happening, she wrote, and should be stopped if we value our lives. “Since the beginning of the space industry, approximately 20,000 tons of material have been demolished during reentry… This is over 100 billion times greater than [the mass of] the Van Allen Belts.” She estimated that if 42,000 Starlink satellites are deployed and regularly demolished — let alone the 1,000,000 satellites planned by other companies and governments — “every second the space industry is adding approximately 2,000 times more conductive material than mass of the Van Allen Belts into the ionosphere.”

“Unlike meteorites, which are small and only contain trace amounts of aluminum, these wrecked spacecraft are huge and consist entirely of aluminum and other exotic, highly conductive materials,” she explained in an April 16, 2024 article in The Guardian.

Much of the metallic dust will settle into the ionosphere where, she says, it could act as a magnetic shield, reducing the magnitude of the Earth’s magnetic field in space. If that happens, the atmosphere itself could eventually be destroyed, because the Earth’s magnetic field — the magnetosphere — is what deflects the solar wind and prevents it from stripping away Earth’s atmosphere, as she told Teresa Pulterova in an interview on Space.com.

Other astronomers involved in the litigation before the FCC and now the Court of Appeals include Meredith Rawls with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile; Gary Hunt with Action Against Satellite Light Pollution in the UK; Samantha Lawler at the University of Regina in Canada; Graeme Cuffy of Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; Mark Phillips, President of the Astronomical Society of Edinburgh; Roberto Trotta of the Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology in London; Carrie Nugent, Associate Professor of Computational Physics and Planetary Science at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts; and Cameron Nelson of Tenzing Startup Consultants in Virginia.

Other issues are also mentioned in the appeal. For example, the burned up aluminum produces aluminum oxide, which destroys ozone and contributes to climate change. So does the water vapor, soot, and nitrogen oxides in rocket exhaust.

Cameron Nelson told the FCC that “Humans, not to mention all other animal and plant life, have not given our consent for SpaceX to send the signals it is proposing into our bodies and irrevocably alter us.”

The BroadBand International Legal Action Network (BBILAN) mentioned “RF/EMF radiation from linked base and earth stations” in comments sent to the FCC. Starlink earth stations, also called Gateways, are far more powerful than the Starlink dishes that people are putting on their homes. The (as of March 2024) 2.6 million Starlink dishes each send one signal up to the moving network of satellites above them. All of this traffic is coordinated in space by thousands of lasers linking the satellites to one another, and on the ground by Gateways, which relay the thousands of signals in a large geographic area to and from the satellites. This is what a Gateway with 5 antennas (“radomes”) looks like:

Some Gateways have up to 40 radomes. Each of those domes weighs 1750 kilograms. Each aims a narrow beam at moving satellites. According to FCC filings by SpaceX, each beam can have an effective radiated power of more than 1,000,000 watts, which it can aim as low as 25 degrees above the horizon. If you are a bird you do not want to fly anywhere near a Starlink Gateway. And if you are a human you do not want to live near one either. When a satellite aims its beam containing thousands of signals at a Gateway, that beam is about 10 miles in diameter by the time it reaches the Earth.

Robin is a subscriber who lives in a remote area of Idaho less than 3 miles from the Starlink Gateway in Colburn.  She writes about effects on her family and her animals…………………………….Robin knows many people in her area who are similarly affected. She adds that “when we first moved here in 2019 we had A LOT of birds. We now have a silent spring, it’s like a dead zone. 

At last count there were 277 Starlink Gateways in operation or under construction in the world: 181 in North America and the Caribbean, 26 in South America, 2 in Africa, 26 in Europe, and 42 in Asia and the Pacific.

The FCC maintains a webpage listing thousands of licenses that it has handed out to hundreds of companies to operate both fixed and mobile satellite earth stations in the United States. Some of these stations are far more powerful than the Starlink Gateways. SES’s earth station at Bristol, Virginia emits up to 1,900,000,000 watts of effective radiated power, and it is allowed to aim it as low as 5 degrees above the horizon. SES’s earth station at Brewster, Washington is allowed to emit almost 1,000,000 watts in the actual direction of the horizon! SES owns O3b mPOWER, which is the satellite system that had its first radomes on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the ship that had the famous outbreak of disease blamed on COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic

May 2, 2024 Posted by | Uncategorized | , , , , | Leave a comment

Is Nuclear Fusion Really The Ultimate Solution to AI’s Crazy Power Use?

By Alex Kimani – Mar 29, 2024, https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Is-Nuclear-Fusion-Really-The-Ultimate-Solution-to-AIs-Crazy-Power-Use.html

  • A Boston Consulting Group analysis has predicted that data center electricity consumption will triple by 2030.
  • Past trends in technology advances suggest that AI cons are very likely to outweigh the pros as far as power demand is concerned.
  • OpenAI’s Altman: nuclear fusion is the ultimate solution to the AI energy puzzle

Two weeks ago, we reported how Artificial Intelligence (AI), cryptocurrency mining and clean energy manufacturing are powering the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or simply 4R, and driving disruptive trends including the rise of data and connectivity, analytics, human-machine interaction, and improvements in robotics. Unfortunately, these secular megatrends are pushing the U.S. power grid to its limits.

According to Sreedhar Sistu, vice president of artificial intelligence at Schneider Electric (OTCPK:SBGSF), excluding China, AI represents 4.3 GW of global power demand, and could grow almost five-fold by 2028. Another analysis has predicted that demand from AI will grow exponentially, increasing at least 10x between 2023 and 2026. 

AI tasks typically demand more powerful hardware than traditional computing tasks. Meanwhile, bitcoin mining shows no signs of slowing down, with mining rates hitting 565 exahashes per second (EH/s) currently, a five-fold increase from three years ago. 

Bitcoin mining consumes 148.63 TWh of electricity per year and emits 82.90 Mt CO2 per year,  comparable to the power consumption of Malaysia. And, data center demand is not helping matters at all. Data center storage capacity is expected to grow from 10.1 zettabytes (ZB) in 2023 to 21.0 ZB in 2027, good for a 18.5% CAGR. 

A Boston Consulting Group analysis has predicted that data center electricity consumption will triple by 2030, enough electricity to power 40 million U.S. homes.

The situation is already getting out of hand: U.S. power demand has started rising for the first time ever in 15 years. “We as a country are running out of energy,” Michael Khoo, climate disinformation program director at Friends of the Earth and co-author of a report on AI and climate, has told CNN. 

To be fair, AI has been touted as one of the key technologies that will help tackle climate change. The revolutionary technology is already being used to track pollution, predict weather, monitor melting ice and map deforestation. A recent report commissioned by Google and published by the Boston Consulting Group claimed AI could help mitigate up to 10% of planet-heating pollution.     

Unfortunately, past trends in technology advances suggest that AI cons are very likely to outweigh the pros as far as power demand is concerned.

Efficiency gains have never reduced the energy consumption of cryptocurrency mining. When we make certain goods and services more efficient, we see increases in demand,” Alex de Vries, a data scientist and researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, has pointed out.

At this point, nearly everybody agrees that we are incapable of developing renewable energy plants fast enough to meet this skyrocketing power demand. So, what other recourse do we have, short of saying let’s just build more natural gas and fossil fuel power plants?

Enter nuclear fusion, long regarded by scientists as the Holy Grail of clean and almost limitless energy. Sam Altman, head of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, says nuclear fusion is the ultimate solution to the AI energy puzzle, “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough, we need fusion,” Altman said in a January interview. Altman reiterated this view a few weeks ago when podcaster and computer scientist Lex Fridman asked him about the AI energy conundrum.

Blue Sky Thinking

Unfortunately, Altman’s proposal is likely another case of overly optimistic blue-sky thinking, and we might not be any closer to building a commercial nuclear fusion reactor than we are to harvesting energy from blackholes.

For decades, nuclear fusion has been considered the “Holy Grail” of clean energy. If we were able to harness its power it would mean endless clean and sustainable energy. It’s what powers stars, and the theory is that it could be successfully applied to nuclear reactors–without the risk of a catastrophic meltdown disaster. 

Scientists have been working on a viable nuclear fusion reactor since the 1950s–ever hopeful that a breakthrough is just around the corner. Unfortunately, the running joke has become that a practical nuclear fusion power plant could be decades or even centuries away, with milestone after milestone having fallen time and again

To be fair again, there’s been some promising glimpses into the possibilities here. Last year, a nuclear fusion reactor in California produced 3.15 megajoules of energy using only 2.05 megajoules of energy input, a rare instance where a fusion experiment produced more energy than it consumed. The vast majority of fusion experiments are energy negative, taking in more energy than they generate thus making them useless as a form of electricity generation. Despite growing hopes that fusion could soon play a part in climate change mitigation by providing vast amounts of clean power for energy-hungry technologies like AI, the world is “still a way off commercial fusion and it cannot help us with the climate crisis now”, Aneeqa Khan, research fellow in nuclear fusion at Manchester University, told the Guardian just after the initial December breakthrough.

You don’t have to look very far to get a healthy dose of reality check. 

For decades, 35 countries have collaborated on the largest and most ambitious scientific experiments ever conceived: the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the biggest-ever fusion power machine. ITER plans to generate plasma at temperatures 10x higher than that of the sun’s core, and generate net energy for seconds at a time. As is usually the case with many nuclear power projects, ITER is already facing massive cost overruns that puts its future viability in question. W

When the ITER project formally commenced operations in 2006, its international partners agreed to fund an estimated €5 billion (then $6.3 billion) for a 10-year plan that would have seen the reactor come online in 2016. Charles Seife, director of the Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism at New York University, has sued ITER for lack of transparency on cost and incessant delays. According to him, the project’s latest official cost estimate now stands at more than €20 billion ($22 billion), with the project nowhere near achieving its key objectives.  To make matters worse, none of ITER’s key players, including the U.S. Department of Energy, has been able to provide concrete answers of whether the team can overcome the technical challenges or estimates of the additional delays, much less the extra expenses.

Seife notes that whereas the Notre Dame took a century to complete, it eventually was used for its intended purpose less than a generation after construction began. However, he concludes by saying that the same can hardly be said about ITER, which looks less and less like a cathedral–and more like a mausoleum.

April 2, 2024 Posted by | Uncategorized | , , , , | Leave a comment

ChatGPT’s boss claims nuclear fusion is the answer to AI’s soaring energy needs. Not so fast, experts say

CNN, 26 Mar 24,

Artificial intelligence is energy-hungry and as companies race to make it bigger, smarter and more complex, its thirst for electricity will increase even further. This sets up a thorny problem for an industry pitching itself as a powerful tool to save the planet: a huge carbon footprint.

Yet according to Sam Altman, head of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, there is a clear solution to this tricky dilemma: nuclear fusion.

Altman himself has invested hundreds of millions in fusion and in recent interviews has suggested the futuristic technology, widely seen as the holy grail of clean energy, will eventually provide the enormous amounts of power demanded by next-gen AI.

“There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough, we need fusion,” alongside scaling up other renewable energy sources, Altman said in a January interview. Then in March, when podcaster and computer scientist Lex Fridman asked how to solve AI’s “energy puzzle,” Altman again pointed to fusion.

Nuclear fusion — the process that powers the sun and other stars — is likely still decades away from being mastered and commercialized on Earth. For some experts, Altman’s emphasis on a future energy breakthrough is illustrative of a wider failure of the AI industry to answer the question of how they are going to satiate AI’s soaring energy needs in the near-term.

It chimes with a general tendency toward “wishful thinking” when it comes to climate action, said Alex de Vries, a data scientist and researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. “It would be a lot more sensible to focus on what we have at the moment, and what we can do at the moment, rather than hoping for something that might happen,” he told CNN.

A spokesperson for OpenAI did not respond to specific questions sent by CNN, only referring to Altman’s comments in January and on Fridman’s podcast.

The appeal of nuclear fusion for the AI industry is clear. Fusion involves smashing two or more atoms together to form a denser one, in a process that releases huge amounts of energy.

It doesn’t pump carbon pollution into the atmosphere and leaves no legacy of long-lived nuclear waste, offering a tantalizing vision of a clean, safe, abundant energy source.

But “recreating the conditions in the center of the sun on Earth is a huge challenge” and the technology is not likely to be ready until the latter half of the century, said Aneeqa Khan, a research fellow in nuclear fusion at the University of Manchester in the UK.

“Fusion is already too late to deal with the climate crisis,” Khan told CNN…………………………………

As well as the energy required to make chips and other hardware, AI requires large amounts of computing power to “train” models — feeding them enormous datasets —and then again to use its training to generate a response to a user query.

As the technology develops, companies are rushing to integrate it into apps and online searches, ramping up computing power requirements. An online search using AI could require at least 10 times more energy than a standard search, de Vries calculated in a recent report on AI’s energy footprint.

The dynamic is one of “bigger is better when it comes to AI,” de Vries said, pushing companies toward huge, energy-hungry models. “That is the key problem with AI, because bigger is better is just fundamentally incompatible with sustainability,” he added.

The situation is particularly stark in the US, where energy demand is shooting upward for the first time in around 15 years, said Michael Khoo, climate disinformation program director at Friends of the Earth and co-author of a report on AI and climate. “We as a country are running out of energy,” he told CNN.

In part, demand is being driven by a surge in data centers. Data center electricity consumption is expected to triple by 2030, equivalent to the amount needed to power around 40 million US homes, according to a Boston Consulting Group analysis.

“We’re going to have to make hard decisions” about who gets the energy, said Khoo, whether that’s thousands of homes, or a data center powering next-gen AI. “It can’t simply be the richest people who get the energy first,” he added…………………………………………………………………..

There has been a “tremendous” increase in AI’s efficiency, de Vries said. But, he cautioned, this doesn’t necessarily mean AI’s electricity demand will fall.

In fact, the history of technology and automation suggests it could well be the opposite, de Vries added. He pointed to cryptocurrency. “Efficiency gains have never reduced the energy consumption of cryptocurrency mining,” he said. “When we make certain goods and services more efficient, we see increases in demand.”

In the US, there is some political push to scrutinize the climate consequences of AI more closely. In February, Sen. Ed Markey introduced legislation aimed at requiring AI companies to be more transparent about their environmental impacts, including soaring data center electricity demand.

“The development of the next generation of AI tools cannot come at the expense of the health of our planet,” Markey said in a statement at the time. But few expect the bill would get the bipartisan support needed to become law…………https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/26/climate/ai-energy-nuclear-fusion-climate-intl/index.html

March 28, 2024 Posted by | Uncategorized | , , , , | Leave a comment

AI, climate change, pandemics and nuclear warfare puts humanity in ‘grave danger’, open letter warns

More than 100 politicians, academics and celebrities urge world leaders to act now against the existential threats facing mankind

Samuel Lovett, DEPUTY EDITOR OF GLOBAL HEALTH SECURITY, 15 February 2024  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-security/ai-climate-change-pandemic-nuclear-warfare-humanity-danger/

Climate change, pandemics, nuclear warfare and artificial intelligence all pose an existential threat to humanity and need to be addressed with “wisdom and urgency”, more than 100 politicians, academics, and celebrities have warned in an open letter.

The signatories, including Annie Lennox, Richard Branson, Gordon Brown and Charles Oppenheimer, whose grandfather developed the atom bomb, said today’s world leaders prioritise “short-term fixes over long-term solutions” and “lack the political will to take decisive action” against the many dangers facing mankind.

“Our world is in grave danger. We face a set of threats that put all humanity at risk. Our leaders are not responding with the wisdom and urgency required,” the letter reads. “We are at a precipice.”       

The signatories list four key demands for future-proofing humanity: a global financing plan to ease the transition to clean energy; arms control talks to reduce the risk of nuclear war; an equitable pandemic treaty to prepare for future outbreaks; and international governance for regulating AI to make it “a force for good”.

“The biggest risks facing us cannot be tackled by any country acting alone. Yet when nations work together, these challenges can all be addressed, for the good of us all,” the letter states.

The call for action is led by the Elders, an independent group of global leaders campaigning for peace and human rights founded by Nelson Mandela, and the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit working to develop transformative technologies for the benefit of humanity.

Other signatories of the letter include Ban Ki-moon, the former UN Secretary-General, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former UK foreign secretary, Helen Clark, the former prime minister of New Zealand, Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, and Amber Valletta, the American model and actress.

The letter also encourages the world’s decision-makers to be “bold” in abandoning their short termism in favour of “long-view leadership”.

“In a year when half the world’s adult population face elections, we urge all those seeking office to take a bold new approach,” it reads.

“We need long-view leadership from decision-makers who understand the urgency of the existential threats we face, and believe in our ability to overcome them. 

“Long-view leadership means showing the determination to resolve intractable problems not just manage them, the wisdom to make decisions based on scientific evidence and reason, and the humility to listen to all those affected.”

The letter comes ahead of the Munich Security Conference, where government officials, military leaders and diplomats will meet on Thursday to discuss international security.

Each year, the conference brings together roughly 350 senior figures from more than 70 countries to engage in an intensive debate on current and future security challenges facing humanity.

Commenting on the open letter, Ban Ki-moon said the range of signatories “makes clear our shared concern: we need world leaders who understand the existential threats we face and the urgent need to address them”.

February 15, 2024 Posted by | Uncategorized | , , , , | Leave a comment

The new space race Is Causing New Pollution Problems

NY Times, Ed Friedman Tue, 30 Jan 2024

The high-altitude chase started over Cape Canaveral on Feb. 17, 2023, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched. Thomas Parent, a NASA research pilot, was flying a WB-57 jet when the rocket ascended past the right wing — leaving him mesmerized before he hit the throttle to accelerate.

For roughly an hour, Mr. Parent dove in and out of the plume in the rocket’s wake while Tony Casey, the sensor equipment operator aboard the jet, monitored its 17 scientific instruments. Researchers hoped to use the data to prove they could catch a rocket’s plume and eventually characterize the environmental effects of a space launch.

In the past few years, the number of rocket launches has spiked as commercial companies — especially SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk — and government agencies have lofted thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit. And it is only the beginning. Satellites could eventually total one million, requiring an even greater number of space launches that could yield escalating levels of emissions.

SpaceX declined to comment about pollution from rockets and satellites. Representatives for Amazon and Eutelsat OneWeb, two other companies working toward satellite mega-constellations, said they are committed to sustainable operations. But scientists worry that more launches will scatter more pollutants in pristine layers of Earth’s atmosphere. And regulators across the globe, who assess some risks of space launches, do not set rules related to pollution.

ImageA single circular-shaped plume from a rocket flying into the blackness of space.

The exhaust plume from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket taking off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in 2018,Credit…Matt Hartman/Associated Press

Experts say they do not want to limit the booming space economy. But they fear that the steady march of science will move slower than the new space race — meaning we may understand the consequences of pollution from rockets and spacecraft only when it is too late. Already, studies show that the higher reaches of the atmosphere are laced with metals from spacecraft that disintegrate as they fall back to Earth.

“We are changing the system faster than we can understand those changes,” said Aaron Boley, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia and co-director of the Outer Space Institute. “We never really appreciate our ability to affect the environment. And we do this time and time again.”

……………………………… By the time a rocket curves into orbit, it will have dumped in the middle and upper layers of the atmosphere as much as two-thirds of its exhaust, which scientists predict will rain down and collect in the lower layer of the middle atmosphere, the stratosphere.

The stratosphere is home to the ozone layer, which shields us from the sun’s harmful radiation. But it is extremely sensitive: Even the smallest of changes can have enormous effects on it — and the world below.

………………………….Just how rockets will affect that relatively clear top, the stratosphere, remains uncertain. But scientists are concerned that black carbon, or soot, that is released from current rockets will act like a continuous volcanic eruption, a change that could deplete the ozone layer and affect the Earth below.

……………………………………………… A Race Against the Space Race

As space companies set records for launches and satellites deployed, scientists are starting to quantify the potential effects.

In a paper published in 2022, soot from rockets was shown to be nearly 500 times as efficient at heating the atmosphere as soot released from sources like airplanes closer to the surface. It’s the muddy-barrel effect.

“That means that as we start to grow the space industry and launch more rockets, we’re going to start to see that effect magnify very quickly,” said Eloise Marais, an associate professor in physical geography at University College London and an author of the study.

That said, Dr. Maloney’s team did not quantify how much more radiation exposure could occur.

The exact amounts of soot emitted by different rocket engines used around the globe are also poorly understood. Most launched rockets currently use kerosene fuel, which some experts call “dirty” because it emits carbon dioxide, water vapor and soot directly into the atmosphere. But it might not be the predominant fuel of the future. SpaceX’s future rocket Starship, for example, uses a mix of liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants.

Still, any hydrocarbon fuel produces some amount of soot. And even “green rockets,” propelled by liquid hydrogen, produce water vapor, which is a greenhouse gas at these dry high altitudes.

“You can’t take what’s green in the troposphere and necessarily think of it being green in the upper atmosphere,” Dr. Boley said. “There is no such thing as a totally neutral propellant. They all have different impacts.”

Smithereens of Satellites

What goes up must come down. Once satellites in low-Earth orbit reach the end of their operational lifetimes, they plunge through the atmosphere and disintegrate, leaving a stream of pollutants in their wake. Although scientists do not yet know how this will influence Earth’s environment, Dr. Ross thinks that it will be the most significant impact from spaceflight.

study published in October found that the stratosphere is already littered with metals from re-entering spacecraft. It used the same NASA WB-57 jet that chased the SpaceX rocket plume last year, studying the stratosphere over Alaska and much of the continental U.S.

When the researchers began analyzing the data, they saw particles that didn’t belong. Niobium and hafnium, for example, do not occur naturally but are used in rocket boosters. Yet these metals, along with other distinct elements from spacecraft, were embedded within roughly 10 percent of the most common particles in the stratosphere.

The findings validate earlier theoretical work, and Dr. Boley, who was not involved in the study, argues that the percentage will only increase given that humanity is at the beginning of the new satellite race.

Of course, researchers cannot yet say how these metals will affect the stratosphere.

“That’s a big question that we have to answer moving forward, but we can’t presume that it won’t matter,” Dr. Boley said.

…………………………………..scientists argue, satellite operators and rocket companies need regulations. Few are currently in place.

“Space launch falls into a gray area,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has been involved in a working group on this research. “It falls between the cracks of all the regulatory authorities.”

The Montreal Protocol, for instance, is a treaty that successfully set limits on chemicals known to harm the ozone layer. But it does not address rocket emissions or satellites.

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency is not responsible for analyzing rocket launches. The Federal Communications Commission licenses large constellations of satellites but does not consider their potential harm to the environment. (The Government Accountability Office called for changes to that F.C.C. policy in 2022, but they have yet to occur.) And the Federal Aviation Administration assesses environmental impacts of rocket launches on the ground, but not in the atmosphere or space.

That could put the stratosphere’s future in the hands of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other private space company executives — which is particularly worrying to Dr. Boley, who says the space industry does not want to slow down.

“Unless it immediately affects their bottom line, they’re simply not interested,” he said. “The environmental impact is an inconvenience.”………  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/science/astronomy-telescopes-satellites-spacex-starlink.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

February 3, 2024 Posted by | Uncategorized | , , , , | Leave a comment