China plans bold asteroid collision test to outpace NASA's DART mission

Nature & Climate Perspective

**The escalating scale of space launch programs threatens stratospheric ozone depletion and alters radiative forcing, complicating earth-bound nature-based carbon sequestration baselines. **

• Rocket launches emit black carbon directly into the stratosphere, persisting longer than tropospheric emissions and accelerating warming that stresses fragile terrestrial ecosystems.
• Disrupted radiative forcing and micro-climatic shifts from increased space missions could destabilize the long-term carbon sequestration capacity of global LULUCF projects.
• The lack of multilateral environmental frameworks for planetary defense initiatives risks unchecked atmospheric degradation, undermining the ecological permanence of high-quality Blue Carbon assets.

Market & Policy Outlook

**Geopolitical dominance in aerospace and planetary defense diverts sovereign capital from Article 6. 2/6.4 mechanisms while challenging the ICVCM principles of environmental integrity.**

• State-funded space defense missions operate outside international carbon accounting, creating massive Scope 3 reporting blind spots for national defense and aerospace supply chains.
• High-tech aerospace resource allocation starves the voluntary carbon market of liquidity needed to scale high-permanence technical Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) pathways.
• Increasing emissions from defense-related aerospace activities highlight a critical gap in SBTi standards, which currently lack robust metrics for stratospheric warming compared to ground-level emissions tracked by I-RECs.