An Ariane 5 rocket blasts off. Scientists are critical of the impact of rocket launches on the environment. Photo: ESA/Zuma Wire/dpa
“Rocket launches are routinely compared with greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions from the aircraft industry, which our work is proving to be wrong,” says Ryan’s project partner Eloise Marais. Knud Jahnke from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, gives a blunt assessment: “Such space flights are harmful to the climate and a sheer waste of resources, just because a few rich people have discovered this as a status symbol.”
He and his colleague Ioannis Kokkinakis took a closer look at the rocket exhaust plume. The effects of the combustion products change significantly depending on the altitude, they reported in the journal Physics Of Fluids.