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From: leech@homer.cs.unc.edu (Jonathan Leech)
Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Re: Ozone and the shuttle
Message-ID: <3162@borg.cs.unc.edu>
Date: 12 Apr 91 19:34:31 GMT
References: <1991Apr12.163103.11472@welch.jhu.edu>
Sender: news@cs.unc.edu
Lines: 91

In article <1991Apr12.163103.11472@welch.jhu.edu>, jimh@welch.jhu.edu (Jim Hoffman) writes:
> I have heard some rumors that the shuttle has caused more damage to the ozone
> layer than all of the CFCs combined.

    You're not the only one hearing rumors.  The following is taken
from "Censored Stories of the Year," originally published in the SF
Bay Guardian, and picked up by a local alternative newspaper.  Things
not quoted are my own comments.

    The article describes "Project Censored," run by Carl Jensen, a
communications professor at Sonoma State University.  The project
"convenes a nationwide panel of "media experts," including Noam
Chomsky, John McLaughlin, and Bill Moyers, to pick the 10 most
important underreported news stories of each year".  Describing how it
functions, "Jensen said he received some 600 submissions.  The stories
are then carefully researched by a Sonoma State class.	Students, with
Jensen's help, weigh the importance of each story against the amount
of national coverage their research unearths.  They then prepare a
list of 25 finalists and forward them to the panel of media experts."

    #4 on the list this year is:
   "NASA Shuttles destroy the ozone shield.
     (SSU Star, Earth Island Journal, San Francisco Chronicle)

   "A report by Gar Smith in the fall issue of _Earth Island Journal_
    restated the warnings of two Soviet rocket scientists that
    originally appeared in _South_ magazine - that each time a U.S.
    space shuttle is launched, 187 tons of ozone-eating molecules are
    released into the atmosphere.  According to Valery Burdakov, who
    helped design the USSR's Energiya rocket engine, and his colleague
    V.	Filin, a single shuttle flight can destroy up to 10 million
    tons of ozone.  It would take only 300 shuttle flights to
    completely destroy the ozone.

   "Gar Smith says the TASS-released findings of the scientists were
    picked up by the European press in the summer of 1989.  Smith's
    article confirmed claims by Dr.  Helen Caldicott that appeared in
    a May 8 stroy by Mindi Levine in the _SSU Star_, the Sonoma State
    U.	campus newspaper, that ``with each launch, 25 percent of the
    ozone is destroyed.  So far the space shuttle has destroyed 10
    percent of the ozone.''

   "On Aug.  21, David Sylvester of the _San Francisco Chronicle_'s
    South Bay Bureau cited a National Toxics Campaign study, authored
    by Lenny Siegel of the SF-based Military Toxics Network, that said
    a single launch of the space shuttle damaged the ozone layer of
    the atmosphere as much as an entire year of industrial emissions
    of CFCs from a single factory.  Siegel's report was later
    published in _Mother Jones_ magazine."

    My comments: There seem to be a number of contradictory estimates,
of ozone loss above.  We have 187 tons/flight, 10 million tons/flight,
25 %/flight, and 10% / ~30 flights (I don't see how these two figures
can be resolved in the same sentence).	These estimates don't even
come close to agreeing, and the percentage estimates don't take into
account the natural regeneration of ozone in the upper atmosphere.

    Without seeing the source material, there's no way to tell if
*any* of these estimates have any validity whatsoever, but the last
three appear completely bogus, along the lines of the claims that a
RTG launch accident would kill tens of thousands of people and make
Florida uninhabitable that we hear from the Christic Institute and the
like.

    In the absence of reviewed research, I think this is all a bunch
of hooey.  The Shuttle may well damage the ozone layer but not
severely or over a long period.  187 tons/flight I might believe.

    This is the only one of the stories on the list which cites the
SSU student newspaper, and I wonder if this isn't a case of
undergraduate ecoawareness getting by Jensen.  I don't get the same
sense of bogosity from most of the other stories on the list:

	1. Flawed coverage of the Gulf crisis
	2. S&L solution is worse than the crime
	3. The CIA role in the S&L crisis
	5. Media blackout of the drug war fraud
	6. What really happened in Panama?
	7. The Pentagon's secret billion-dollar black budget
	8. The Bill of Rights had a close call
	9. Where was George?
	10. America's Banking crisis.

    Make of this what you will (don't flame me, I'm just quoting the
article).  It would be interesting to hear the original material from
Burdakov.
--
    Jon Leech (leech@cs.unc.edu)    __@/
    ``Thus Mathematics helps / our brains and hands and feet
      and can make / a race of supermen out of us.''
	- The Education of T. C. Mits