Tracking Rocket Launch and Spacecraft Re-entry Emissions Across the Space Age

Deployment of satellite megaconstellations has led to unprecedented growth in the space industry, with record launch rates and anthropogenic mass re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere in 2025. These activities uniquely release air pollutant emissions throughout all atmospheric layers, leading to long lifetimes in upper atmospheric layers where turnover rates are very slow. A growing number of recent studies have highlighted the potential of these emissions to result in extremely effective stratospheric ozone depletion and radiative forcing. With rocket launch emissions in the satellite megaconstellation era (2020-present) now dwarfing those of the 20ᵗʰ century, there is an ever greater need to quantify space industry emissions across the space age. We previously published a 3-D, global inventory of space industry emissions for the megaconstellation era (2020-2022), categorized by whether the launch contained megaconstellation payloads. This inventory, designed for input to global chemistry-climate models, included black carbon (BC), nitrogen oxides (NO_x≡NO+NO₂), water vapour (H₂O), carbon monoxide (CO), alumina aerosol (Al₂O₃) and chlorine species (Cl_y≡HCl+Cl₂+Cl) from rocket launches and nitrogen oxides (NO_x≡NO) and oxidized alumina (AlO_x) from re-entries. Here we present a significant expansion to our inventory to cover the entirety of the space age (1957-present), demonstrating significant increases in recent rocket launch and re-entry emissions since 2020. We also introduce new emission species from re-entry (BC, HCl, Cl) and present an online platform to visualise the growth in space industry emissions (https://cbarker211.github.io/). We will use our historical emissions data to drive the calculation of future pathways for the space industry, presenting business-as-usual, conservative, and high-growth scenarios. We will also implement our updated geolocated emissions into the GEOS-Chem 3-D model of atmospheric composition coupled to a radiative transfer model to assess the long-term impacts on ozone and climate.