When burned, methane produces water and carbon dioxide, which are less harmful to the environment. The issue here is not with rocket testing, but with improper storage of methane

billionaires existing should be illegal

If BO is being that careless with methane emissions then they are breaking laws. Report them

Fun notes from America's other privately owned, publicly funded space program. Even if you think that privatization of space is a good thing (you're wrong, it's not, but let's just assume for the sake of argument that it is) how do you justify the fact that the public takes on huge swaths of the development cost, then has to pay to use the service, then has to pay to clean up externalities like an ocean of methane in the atmosphere?

Eating the billionaires sounds more and more attractive every day.

Let's not make dirty industrial activity clean, let's move it off world (destroying another different planet). Because, you know, that's apparently easier than actually solving the problem.

Well, just when I manage to stop worrying about climate change so much...

It sounds like they should be more careful with how they store their methane.

I do want to stress though, that I think that space technology is the single most important subject we can focus on, except maybe medical. If extravagant trips for billionaire's can fund a bunch of it for now, that's fine by me. Only really means that governments should be doing more.

Every day, the sun emits roughly a billion times more energy than the earth uses. That is, all our technology, all our food, all animals, all plants and all the energy needed to create all weather combined consumes about one billionth of the sun's output. The rest is sent into deep space.

This waste of the sun's energy is so vast, that we as a species absolutely want to start capturing more of it as soon as possible, rather than squabbling in the mud for fractions of the 0.0000001% of the sun's output the earth uses today. Obviously we need our planet to survive until then, but getting proper infrastructure in orbit and beyond is such a massive game changer.

Yo dawg we heard you like greenhouse gases.

So we have hydrogen as rocket fuel that does not produce greenhouse gasses when burned and they decide to develop methane as a fuel source instead! Why!?!

"Oh poo..."

• three generations inbred billionaire heir having their view of earth ruined by methane clouds during their million dollar space tourism flight.

Dudes the fuckin antichrist

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Most of the problem stems from just a few kinds of places: natural gas wells and pipelines, cattle feedlots, coal mines, rice paddies, and landfills.

Such was the case on June 4, when a plume of the gas was detected at the sprawling ranch in West Texas where billionaire Jeff Bezos tests space rockets.

It turns out that Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin LLC, routinely emits the stuff because it’s developing a rocket that runs on liquefied natural gas, which is almost pure methane.

The state air regulator, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, doesn’t impose limits on methane emissions or require disclosure of releases.

Wells and pipelines in the Permian Basin, a huge oilfield near the rocket site, are thought to give off some 2.7 million tons of methane a year.

In a 2019 speech at Blue Origin, he envisioned a future in which dirty industrial activity took place off-world and that our home was “zoned for residential and light industry.” As he tweeted in 2018, “We go to space to save the Earth.”

The original article contains 648 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

The state air regulator, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, doesn’t impose limits on methane emissions or require disclosure of releases.

Well there's your problem.

Billionaire space folly will attract 100% tax when I am finally in charge.

I guess his ex wife will need to fund methane capture programs now to tidy up his mess

I dislike Blue Origin as much as the next guy, but IMO the article (or at least the headline) distracts from the real problem here (the fossil fuel industry):

An air permit application filed with the TCEQ in January 2020 said the company expected to routinely dump LNG into the air to the tune of 3.4 million cubic feet a year, which would work out to more than 60 tons of methane.

Of course, Blue Origin’s emissions pale in comparison with those from its suppliers in the natural gas industry. Wells and pipelines in the Permian Basin, a huge oilfield near the rocket site, are thought to give off some 2.7 million tons of methane a year

Well that stinks.

So what? What are you going to do about it?

Well how else is he going to find a new planet... duh!