OK thats a big number, but we are talking about spreading heavy elements around the atmosphere, some portion of which will end up in the soil, then in us.

Let's examine a reductio ad absurdum of a medium term future where we have 1000x more space vehicles all taking space dumps into the atmosphere. Would that be best practice? Is there a better norm we could establish today?

If de-orbiting is your concern, then I would suggest taking a step back and considering the impact on our atmosphere of increasing the number of launches.

This isn't a theoretical question. There's growing awareness among researchers that there's a need to research how the gasses and particles produced by rocket launches at scale could have an impact on the atmosphere.

https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/features/2023/rocket-polluti...

Scrolling on that link doesn’t work on FF, Safari or Brave on iOS.

I have JS disabled so I can scroll, but the page is long and blank. There's some text if I view source at least.

Are you scrolling up? That caught me out for a moment.

Thanks for the link. Nice use of web tech to illustrate an issue.

This is 2 1/2 tons, not all of it nickel. Approximately 48.5 tons of meteorites hit the earth every day https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-meteorites/ and those are around 1-1.8% nickel https://sites.wustl.edu/meteoritesite/items/metal-iron-nicke...

So, there's about 1/2 a ton of nickel falling into the atmosphere every day anyway, 180 tons a year, already in the ballpark of your thousand ships.