How Green is Virgin Galactic?
Max Luke and Jenna Mukuno: Boldly Going Where No Greens Have Gone Before, Wall Street Journal
“When you include the energy of the entire Virgin Galactic operation, which includes support aircraft, it is seven times more than the flight from Singapore to London. As such, a single trip on Virgin Galactic will require twice as much energy as the average American consumes each year. (These numbers were confirmed by a representative for Virgin Galactic.)”
Virgin’s Spaceship Already Meets Fuel-Economy Goal, , George Whitesides, Wall Street Journal
“The article rightly implies that a return economy trip from London to Singapore, in any modern airliner, will generate a C02 footprint per passenger of at least two tons. The FAA estimates that Virgin Galactic’s fully reusable SpaceShipTwo passenger spacecraft will take you to space and back leaving a carbon footprint of just 0.28 tons–in fact, less than the carbon output of an economy return seat from Los Angeles to New York. To be fair to the authors, Virgin Galactic, for safety reasons, launches its spacecraft from a specially designed carrier aircraft. This aircraft is the largest all-carbon-composite aviation vehicle ever built and is the lightest and most fuel-efficient aircraft of its size. Therefore, in a typical space mission fuel usage for the carrier aircraft will only equate to a carbon footprint per astronaut passenger of about 1.5 tons, giving a total for aircraft and spaceship of around 1.8 tons (less than a return economy class ticket from London to Singapore).”
SpaceShipTwo Goes Supersonic for Third Time, earlier post
It sounds like a lot, but when you compare these numbers against the world carbon dioxide emissions in 2013– 40 BILLION tons of CO2– it is in fact, completely trivial. Even if Virgin were to fly a million passengers a year, the carbon emissions would still not even be enough to show up as a change in the fourth decimal point.
This is, of course, why carbon emission is such a hard problem.
The temperature plunge underneath the 2013 polar vortex weather system probably induced more carbon dioxide emissions from North America, by virtue of increased heating requirements, than Virgin Galactic will burn in multiple lifetimes.
John. Pithy summary of facts. GREAT ANALYSIS and post.
Keith … off topic but as you know the chinese are, according to several people who comment here, taking over the space industry and America is being left in the dust. This will probably only strengthen their arguement *snap*
http://news.xinhuanet.com/e…
Bear in mind that the $200,000 per passenger would eventually be spent on other energy consuming stuff otherwise, say 3 or 4 years worth of what the average American consumes!
Yep. I’m not worried about it myself and wish Virgin Galactic great success in their business (even though I’ll never be able to afford to go) because the data is clearly showing that the carbopocalypse was massively overhyped and just isn’t a serious problem. But for people who do claim to believe in the carbopocalypse so seriously that it justifies intrusion into how you live your life, it is disgustingly hypocritical for themselves to be involved in something like space tourism. Sort of like Kerry recently bragging about how he flew 280,000 miles over the past few years to fight global warming since he is so worried about it – probably more than an order of magnitude more miles than I will fly in my entire life.
Sacrifice is for us little people, not for the elite who preach it to us.
By data, you must mean all the data that climate scientists don’t have. If you got said data, publish a paper.
Plenty of published research showing that the global temperature has remained stable for over 17 years now contrary to the model forecasts of warming, arctic sea ice extent has remained stable since about 2007, recent Cryosat data shows arctic ice thickness & volume now increasing, Greenland ice cap melting was near the historical average last year, Antarctic sea ice extent has been increasing for years, east Antarctic ice cap has been growing for years, recent Antarctic ice shelf losses discovered to have slowed and been in part the result of sea floor errosion trends rather than temperature, snow, rain, drought, and catastrophic weather of all kinds shown to have remained within statistical norms in recent years, etc. While the whole hypothesized catastrophic anthropogenic global warming thing may have seemed a forgone conclusion to lots of folks a decade or so ago, the data over the intervening years just hasn’t lived up to the forecasts and the theory is looking quite shaky these days. That’s why space tourists don’t bother me. But people who think its okay to spew multiple lifetimes worth of CO2 to get their jollies for a few minutes while telling you and me what kind of light bulbs we can’t buy should just shut their two-faced mouths.