Space Tourism, Climate Change and the Need for Sustainable Space Exploration

World Changing: Space Tourism, Climate Change and the Need for Sustainable Space Exploration
Will space tourism be a major climate change propellant? A new study reported in Nature finds that the impacts of a commercial space industry could be serious, even catastrophic:

[E]missions from 1,000 private rocket launches a year would persist high in the stratosphere, potentially altering global atmospheric circulation and distributions of ozone. The simulations show that the changes to Earth's climate could increase polar surface temperatures by 1 °C, and reduce polar sea ice by 5–15%.
"There are fundamental limits to how much material human beings can put into orbit without having a significant impact," says Martin Ross, an atmospheric scientist...


Given how rapidly the aerospace industry is growing, how much demand for space tourism there seems to be among the very wealthy, and how big these impacts are, these findings seem to demand serious attention.

Indeed, we would seem to need a much greater focus on sustainable space exploration in general. We're serious supporters of space programs as a way to understand and protect the home planet. That said, today's aerospace technologies present many environmental and social equity challenges. I've written before about the need for environmental law in space. Now it seems pressure needs to be exerted on limiting the emissions of rocket tourists.

Perhaps it's time for an advocacy group, Sustainable Space?