As Rocket Launches Increase, They May Be Polluting the Skies
By Ramin Skibba
April 6, 2026
Introduction:
(Undark) ROCKET LAUNCHES used to be a rare occurrence. But with access to space proliferating, partly thanks to an abundance of commercial space companies, global launches have risen exponentially: In the last five years, they’ve nearly tripled. According to an analysis by SpaceNews, in 2025 alone, humans shot about 320 rockets into space.
All those rockets produce a fair amount pollution, from the sooty plumes that catapult them into orbit and beyond to derelict satellites that burn up upon reentry. Regulators have been monitoring and restricting other air pollutants especially since the 1970s, including the exhaust from cars and jet engines. Many researchers believe such regulations are overdue for rocket engines — especially because nobody really knows exactly how much damage those pollutants cause. “It might be another 10 years until we found how large the influences on the atmosphere actually are,” said Leonard Schulz, a geophysicist at the University of Braunschweig – Institute of Technology in Northern Germany. By that time, he added, the pollution could accumulate to the point that, you cannot easily reverse it.
Though space pollution is still small compared to the aviation industry, rocket exhaust may be gradually depleting Earth’s protective ozone layer, which is still recovering from the impacts of pollution from a class of chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons. (CFCs, as they are known, were once commonly used as coolant in refrigerators and air conditioners, among other uses, and were regulated in the late 1980s.) But with limited data and industry transparency, many unknowns and uncertainties persist, including the impacts of next-generation rocket fuels.
Compared to other sources of pollution, the effects of sending rockets into space and from space debris that comes back down from orbit “has been negligible,” said Christopher Maloney, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado who works out of the Chemical Sciences Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, with recent research on emissions from rockets and reentries. “But if you follow these trends, what is it going to look like?”
The article points out that some rockets may be worse than others. A factor that may ultimately affect "rocketry development."
Read more here:
https://undark.org/2026/04/06/as-rocke ... the- skies
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