Impact of Rocket Launch and Space Debris Air Pollutant Emissions on Stratospheric Ozone and Global Climate

Abstract

The space industry is one of the world's fastest growing sectors. Global revenue generated from this industry is forecast to grow from 350 million USD in 2019 to more than 1 trillion USD by 2040 (Morgan Stanley, 2020). This demand stems from significantly reduced launch costs driven by commercialization (Jones, 2018), increased reliance on satellite technologies for global positioning systems, surveillance and broadband internet (Alvino et al., 2019;Dolgopolov et al., 2018;George, 2019), and postulated space resource extraction (Hein et al., 2020) and militarization (Quintana, 2017). To meet growing demand, new spaceports and launch vehicle companies are being established in historically aeronautically active nations such as the US and Russia, and in nations with emerging space sectors such as China and India (Patel, 2019;Roberts, 2019). In 2021, commercial space flights by Virgin Galactic (Gorman, 2021), Blue Origin (Johnson, 2021), and SpaceX (Wattles, 2021) demonstrated that space tourism is plausible, though the scale of this nascent industry is uncertain. Such rapid growth demands detailed understanding of the potential impact on the protective stratospheric ozone (O 3 ) layer and climate.