The Rocket Boom Has a Dark Side That Nobody’s Talking About 18%
By Darren Orf35%
7/8/2026, 1:30:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Pessimism Bias, Appeal to Authority, and Biased Writer Voice, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 43.1% saturation with 366 hits. Analysis detected 2,682 faulty-reasoning hits from 849 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 33.2% and a BS Rank of 18% (18,049 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 82.50% of the article peer group.
Kevin Carter // Getty Images
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
Rocket launches are tripling, and the soot they leave behind lingers in the atmosphere far longer than expected.
Scientists warn that this pollution could cool the planet in what’s essentially an unregulated geoengineering experiment that’s already underway.
With launches projected to keep climbing, experts say we must act before atmospheric damage becomes irreversible.
On June 20, 1944, a rocket crossed into space for the first time in history.
Now, over 80 years later, humanity is launching more rockets into space than ever before.
These rocket launches provide some serious benefits—without them, technological marvels like GPS satellite networks and ultra-sophisticated tools like the James Webb Space Telescope would be impossible.
But with the advent of satellite megaconstellations—networks of a several thousand satellites, arguably the most famous of which is SpaceX ’s Starlink—the number of rocket launches traveling through (and subsequently polluting) Earth’s upper atmosphere have increased exponentially.
According to a new study led by scientists at University College London (UCL), humans collectively launched 114 rockets in 2020.
By 2025, that number had tripled, the main driver of which SpaceX’s relentless buildout of its Starlink megaconstellation, which already has more than 10,000 satellites in orbit.
The authors report that the increased number of launches could have an untold effect on Earth’s upper atmosphere, which has remained relatively unscathed by human activities until recently.
The results of the study were published in the journal Earth’s Future .
One molecule of particular interest is black carbon, or soot, that enters the atmosphere from both rocket launches and reentries.
These soot particles linger in the atmosphere 500 times longer than they do in air closer to the ground, which could have an outsized impact on Earth’s climate in the future.
“Currently the impact on the atmosphere is small, so we still have the chance to act early before it becomes a more serious issue that is harder to reverse or repair,” Eloise Marais, project lead of the study from UCL, said in a press statement .
“So far there has been limited effort to effectively regulate this type of pollution.”
However, that “small” impact is likely to change.
The study estimates that in 2020, megaconstellation launches accounted for 35 percent of the carbon impact of spaceflights, but that number (even by conservative estimates) could rise to 42 percent by 2029.
And soot also isn’t the only climate concern.
A study published earlier this year in Communications Earth & Environment found that a February 20, 2025, Falcon 9 launch—which grabbed headlines when the fireball of its failure could be seen across Europe—released 30 kilograms of lithium into the atmosphere.
That’s more than 10 times the planet’s typical daily amount.
Interestingly, the new study also points out that the pollution from these rockets—and their outsized impact on the upper atmosphere—could inadvertently cool the planet as the injected aerosols block some sunlight from reaching Earth.
Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is a well-known geoengineering technique in which sulfur dioxide is purposefully injected into the stratosphere, mimicking the natural processes of volcanoes.
Such experiments haven’t been deployed on a large scale due to fears of potential unknown side effects.
But according to the UCL scientists, such an experiment might already be underway without us even having realized.
“The space industry pollution is like a small-scale, unregulated geoengineering experiment that could have many unintended and serious environmental consequences,” Marais said in a press statement.
“The cooling effect from the reduction in sunlight that we calculate with our models may sound like a welcome change against the backdrop of global warming, but we need to be extremely cautious.”
While this impact on upper atmosphere remains uncertain, UCL scientists did confirm that launches (thankfully) didn’t interfere with the ozone layer , since most don’t emit the chlorine necessary to impact it directly.
By 2029, constellation launches will deplete the ozone by only 0.2 percent—less than what’s required by the 1987 Montreal Protocol.
While SpaceX leads the way in sheer numbers of rocket launches per year, competitors in the U.S. (such as the Jeff Bezos-backed Blue Origin) and increasingly frequent launches in China will only make a bad problem worse.
It’s critical that we fully understand what rocket launches are doing to the upper atmosphere before the damage becomes irreversible.
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works.
You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.
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3speakers23%attributed speech654writer words
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100%flagged-word coverageEloise Marais
119 attributed words61% of attributed speech93% writer coverage
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