Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The carbon footprint of an astronaut going into space on eg a Falcon 9 is on the order of that of a couple average American families for a year. You certainly mean the direct carbon footprint, right? Not counting what was involved in building the rocket, importing the material, test launches while developing the technology, etc? > It's not a huge impact compared to how much they advance our understanding of how to…
I've gotten the memo, thanks, I've devoted a good amount of time to this stuff, and yes, some things are useful enough that they're worth emitting their relatively insignificant amounts of CO2 for. Obviously, it's the wrong direction on CO2, but we don't have an alternative for lifting stuff into space, yet. And even if they got to 10,000 Falcon 9 launches per year (they're at ~80, so >100x), it would add something l…
You make it sound like we get a lot of value from astronauts surviving in space, and that the CO2 footprint of the space business is almost nothing.
I disagree with both. They don't really make any useful work (that could not be done by robots) other than surviving there, and the carbon footprint of the space business is going to grow much bigger (if those companies are successful) than what you seem to believe.
> it's less clear, but it's a close-enough estimate for setting the context in an internet comment
It surely is convenient to ignore them :-)