Detailed examination of the impact of modern space launches on the Earth's atmosphere is crucial, given booming investment in the space industry and an anticipated space tourism era. We develop air pollutant emissions inventories for rocket launches and re-entry of reusable components and debris in 2019 and for a speculative space tourism scenario based on the recent billionaire space race. This we include in the global GEOS-Chem model coupled to a radiative transfer model to determine the influence on stratospheric ozone (O-3) and climate. Due to recent surge in re-entering debris and reusable components, nitrogen oxides from re-entry heating and chlorine from solid fuels contribute equally to all stratospheric O-3 depletion by contemporary rockets. Decline in global stratospheric O-3 is small (0.01%), but reaches 0.15% in the upper stratosphere (similar to 5 hPa, 40 km) in spring at 60-90 degrees N after a decade of sustained 5.6% a(-1) growth in 2019 launches and re-entries. This increases to 0.24% with a decade of emissions from space tourism rockets, undermining O-3 recovery achieved with the Montreal Protocol. Rocket emissions of black carbon (BC) produce substantial global mean radiative forcing of 8 mW m(-2) after just 3 years of routine space tourism launches. This is a much greater contribution to global radiative forcing (6%) than emissions (0.02%) of all other BC sources, as radiative forcing per unit mass emitted is similar to 500 times more than surface and aviation sources. The O-3 damage and climate effect we estimate should motivate regulation of an industry poised for rapid growth.

Australian wildfires burning from December 2019 to January 2020 injected approximately 0.9 Tg of smoke into the stratosphere; this is the largest amount observed in the satellite era. A comparison of numerical simulations to satellite observations of the plume rise suggests that the smoke mass contained 2.5% black carbon. Model calculations project a 1 K warming in the stratosphere of the Southern Hemisphere midlatitudes for more than 6 months following the injection of black-carbon containing smoke. The 2020 average global mean clear sky effective radiative forcing at top of atmosphere is estimated to be -0.03 W m(-2) with a surface value of -0.32 W m(-2). Assuming that smoke particles coat with sulfuric acid in the stratosphere and have similar heterogeneous reaction rates as sulfate aerosol, we estimate a smoke-induced chemical decrease in total column ozone of 10-20 Dobson units from August to December in mid-high southern latitudes.