Space tourism's toll on climate

摘要

If space tourism ever gets off the ground, soot from rockets carrying travellers into space could disrupt the stratosphere and send temperatures soaring at the poles. Martin Ross of the Aerospace Corporation in Los Angeles, California, and colleagues, modelled the effect of 1000 suborbital trips per year. They assumed they were fuelled by a rubber-burning engine similar to the one Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo might use.