Thomas James beats the eternally clueless Bruce Gagnon with a heavy cluebat. One could say that he beats him senseless, but it's so short a journey that it would be pointless.

It does bring to mind an interesting issue. If we do ever achieve the desideratum of low-cost, high-volume launch, will it become a significant contributor to atmospheric pollution? As Thomas points out, Jet A and oxygen overwhelm rocket exhaust by orders of magnitude, so it's hard to imagine lox/RP, lox-hydrogen or even lox-methane as being a problem, but I can see a point at which solids might be banned (though I suspect that they'd have long before that point been eliminated as unsafe and uneconomical).

Rand, I get Alan Boyle on the link.

Not any more...

The argument he uses that stuff that is ejected above the ozone layer doesn't matter, is flawed. Anything added to the atmosphere above the ozone layer, unless it evaporates into space or changes into something else, will eventually be convected down into the stratosphere.

At sufficiently high flight rates, even water in the upper atmosphere can become a problem, forming high altitude ice crystals that will perturb the chemistry (as they do in the antarctic ozone hole) and acting as net sources of heating for the lower atmosphere by reflecting back long wave IR.

I doubt this will be a significant concern anytime soon, unfortunately.

Bruce's constitiency is religious, not rational, so I don't think the ol cluebat will have much effect, as fun as it might be.

If you really want to get his goat, start a religion about aliens wanting us to join them in space ASAP, Gaia be damned.