Starship lifts off on third test flight
Starship lifts off on third test flight
SpaceX’s Starship vehicle lifted off on its third test flight March 14, making significant progress compared to its first two.
It did the thing!!
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The assessment noted that SpaceX did not plan to recover any Starship debris or have any boats or aircraft in the area to monitor the reentry and splashdown. It added that “any debris is expected to have sufficient mass to sink to the seafloor.”
Great for the environment
It's mostly steel. Nothing toxic, not even kerosene or solid propellant.
I'm sure there are some electronics or materials there that you wouldn't want in a bathtub with you, but I agree with your point. This is literally a drop in the ocean compared to the mass amounts of other pollution sources. Honestly, the diesel the retrieval boats would need to burn to retrieve the debris is probably worse for the environment.
I agree that its not great to dump items in the ocean. But given that it is rather hard to predict exactly where it will drop, and how fast if would sink after hitting the ocean surface with significant velocity, it would take an army of boats to recover anything.
For rockets i feel you have two large impacts to the environment, the production cost and the burned propellant. For starship the construction does not require too much harmful material i geuss. And the fuel is methane and oxygen. Methane will convert to CO2, but it does not have any nitrogen. Not as good as hydrogen + oxygen in the combustion product which only leaves water.
Looking at environmental impact is always hard, because you need to look at the whole lifecycle. Which frankly i am too lazy to compute here. Perhaps they have performed some research into it required by some legislation.
That is the fate of pretty much every rocket booster with the exception of Falcon 9. Starship is designed to be a fully reusable launch system (booster and upper stage) and these tests are stepping stones towards that goal.