I was wondering today about the carbon footprint of his launch “to colonize Mars”. How many weeks or months of climate progress does he negate?
I will calculate that.
SpaceX Starship - 750 metric tons or 750,000 kg of methane, with 562,000 kg of carbon. 1 gallon of gasoline weighs 6 pounds or 3 kg, with 2.6 kg of carbon. Thus, a Starship fuel load contains the carbon of 220 thousand gallons of gasoline.
But to get a sizable population of us off of our planet and into a space colony or onto some celestial body, that will be difficult.
I'll use
SpaceX Dragon 2 as a benchmark, even though it is an extreme best case. It can carry 4 people and it goes into space atop a
Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket, a recent version of
Falcon 9 Full Thrust It uses 155,800 kg of kerosene, with 130,000 kg of carbon. That's 33,000 kg/person, or 13,000 gallons of gasoline per person. At 25 miles per gallon, that is like driving 300,000 miles. If one commutes 30 miles per day, that is about 10,000 days of commuting or 30 years of commuting.
This is an extreme best case, since that spacecraft is designed to ferry people to low Earth orbit without having a lot of supplies on board. To go to Mars and to bring colonization supplies will require a lot more rocket propellant per person, an equivalent to each one driving much further.
So one concludes that moving large numbers of people to space colonies or other celestial bodies is something totally impractical.