There is a particular kind of cognitive dissonance that modern life specialises in. It sits quietly in the background, rarely examined, occasionally glimpsed, and then quickly looked away from. It goes something like this.
You are told the planet is under serious threat. The science is clear, the timeline is urgent, and the responsibility sits, at least in part, with you. So you make adjustments. You think twice before flying. You swap a reliable diesel for an electric car that costs twice as much and leaves you anxious about charging on a long drive. You buy less, recycle more, read labels, pay a premium for things made with less damage. You do your bit because you believe it matters, and because not doing it feels irresponsible.
Meanwhile, rockets are leaving the Earth at a rate of one every other day.
The Scale of What Is Actually Happening
In 2025, there were 315 orbital rocket launches globally. One company alone, a private commercial operation, accounted for 165 of them. That is more than every other space agency and launch company on the planet combined, and it represents a number that was simply unimaginable a decade ago. In 2020, the same company launched 25 times. The trajectory is not levelling off. It is accelerating.
This isn’t a government programme in the traditional sense. It is a commercial industry, operating at industrial scale, growing faster than any regulatory framework has been designed to handle. The environmental conversation around it has barely started.
The emissions from a rocket launch are not straightforward to compare with a car journey or a transatlantic flight, and anyone who tells you they are is simplifying. But the relevant detail is this: rockets don’t release their exhaust at ground level, where weather systems and rain eventually scrub the atmosphere clean. They inject it directly into the upper layers of the atmosphere, into the stratosphere and beyond, where the same particles can linger for years and have a warming effect that researchers at University College London have estimated to be around 500 times more potent per unit than the same soot released at the surface. The concern isn’t the total volume yet. It is where it goes, and what happens when the frequency doubles again.
Ozone depletion is part of this. A 2025 study in Nature found that at current growth trajectories, launch emissions could measurably set back the ozone layer’s recovery before the end of the decade. The layer we spent forty years trying to protect by banning aerosol cans and refrigerants.
You gave up your aerosol deodorant for this.
The Absence of Scrutiny
What is striking is not that this is happening. Technological development tends to move faster than the conversations around it. What is striking is the near total absence of scrutiny applied to the environmental cost, at a moment when environmental scrutiny is being applied to almost everything else.
The same cultural atmosphere that asks you to think carefully about a short haul flight, to consider whether your next car should be your last petrol vehicle, to read about the carbon cost of your food choices, has produced almost no equivalent pressure on an industry that is injecting soot directly into the stratosphere at an increasing rate. There is no public accounting. No carbon offset conversation. No uncomfortable question asked at a press conference that gets the same traction as a story about beef farming.
This is not to say that individuals making more careful choices are wasting their time. They are not. Behaviour matters, culture matters, and the cumulative effect of millions of people taking their environmental responsibilities seriously is real. But the asymmetry is worth noticing. The loudest calls for environmental accountability have been directed, almost entirely, downward. At consumers. At households. At commuters.
The conversation about what is happening several kilometres above all of our heads has been quieter.
Then Bolivia Happened
Here is where it gets genuinely difficult.
In December 2025, Bolivia’s new government issued a decree allowing satellite internet companies, including Starlink, to operate legally in the country. For years, the previous administration had refused, citing data sovereignty concerns, while a grey market flourished, with people smuggling satellite kits across the borders from Peru and Chile because the demand was simply that strong. Teachers in remote southern towns had been working without reliable internet for years. Communities separated from basic digital infrastructure by geography, by poverty, by the simple fact of where they were born.
Starlink changed that. The same constellation of satellites that required hundreds of rocket launches to assemble, the same infrastructure accumulating in the upper atmosphere, is now connecting people in highland Bolivia, rural Philippines, and dozens of other places where the alternative was nothing.
This isn’t a marginal benefit. The digital divide is not an abstract problem. In places without reliable connectivity, children cannot access the same education as children in cities. Clinicians cannot get second opinions. Small businesses cannot reach markets. The difference between having internet access and not having it, in a remote community in the developing world, is not a quality of life adjustment. It is a different life.
The satellites doing this required rockets. The rockets have a cost. Both of those things are true at the same time.
The Question Nobody Is Asking
The problem is not that this trade off exists. Trade offs always exist. Difficult technologies tend to carry difficult costs, and the history of infrastructure is full of examples where real harm produced real benefit and the argument about whether it was worth it never fully resolved.
The problem is that the trade off is not being examined openly. There is no honest public accounting of what the accelerating launch schedule costs atmospherically, set against what it delivers in connectivity and access. The cost is distributed silently across the entire planet, borne most acutely by the upper atmosphere, while the benefit is visible, nameable, and celebrated.
Individual decisions get scrutinised. System level decisions, the ones taken at a scale that dwarfs anything a household can do, are presented as progress and left largely unexamined.
That inconsistency is worth noticing. Not because there is a simple answer, and not to suggest that the people in Bolivia should wait for a cleaner technology that may arrive decades too late for them. But because an honest conversation about the real cost of the infrastructure we are building is more useful than directing all of our environmental energy at the choices of ordinary people while something considerably larger escapes meaningful discussion entirely.
The atmosphere doesn’t distinguish between a diesel engine and a rocket booster. It just absorbs what it’s given.
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