Astronaut Matthias Maurer said he saw burning rainforests and dried-up lakes from space.
Dark and light green areas distinguish the rainforests and agricultural activities, Maurer said.
Astronauts can see from the ISS the impact that the climate crisis is having on Earth, he said.
Photos show how NASA built a $50 billion mega-rocket and spaceship to return astronauts to the moon
No astronauts have set foot on the moon since the last Apollo mission 50 years ago, in 1972.
NASA has spent 12 years and $20 billion building a new rocket, SLS, to put boots back on the lunar surface.
The rocket launched an Orion spaceship toward the moon for the first time on Wednesday. The mission is called Artemis I.
If the uncrewed Orion capsule makes it around the moon and back without a hitch, the Artemis II mission will carry astronauts on a similar roundabout.
The Artemis III mission aims to land humans on the moon in 2025.
Eventually, NASA plans to set up a permanent base on the moon, then use it to gather resources for sending astronauts to Mars.
But first Artemis I has to prove the spaceship’s heat shield will preserve it as it plummets back through Earth’s atmosphere, to a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
To get these powerful, giant pieces of equipment to the launchpad, the space agency needed to build them and test their mettle.
Development for SLS began in 2011. The design involved a small upper-stage rocket, a massive core stage, and two flight-support boosters attached to the side.
The boosters were already built. NASA just took leftover 177-foot mini-rockets from the Space Shuttles and repurposed them to attach to the sides of SLS.
Each booster is made of five segments full of solid fuel.
NASA calls them ‘the largest, most powerful boosters ever built for flight.’ In extensive ground testing, they produced about 3.6 million pounds of thrust.
The first sign of the SLS rocket coming to life, in the final seconds before launch, was the ignition of four RS-25 engines that make up its core stage.
The core stage of the SLS alone measures 212 feet. Essentially, it’s two giant connected fuel tanks: one which holds 196,000 gallons of liquid oxygen, and a second larger tank, holding 537,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen.
These tanks, along with the rocket boosters, provide the thrust to push through the thickest parts of the atmosphere.
Development on the Orion spaceship began 17 years ago, before SLS was even in the picture.
The Orion spacecraft’s heat shield is designed to protect the capsule — and the astronauts inside it — from the nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit it will experience when it reenters Earth’s atmosphere.
At the base is the European Service Module, built by the European Space Agency, which will guide Orion through space and around the moon long after the SLS has been jettisoned post-launch.
Above the Service Module is the Crew Module, which has four seats for astronauts.
Though no astronauts are aboard Orion on the Artemis I test flight, mannequins to assess radiation, zero gravity indicators, and artifacts are taking a trip around the moon in the capsule.
Engineers have extensively tested Orion’s emergency abort system, which is designed to jettison the spaceship away from a failing rocket, saving any astronauts inside.
NASA shipped all the parts to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where engineers and technicians slowly stacked the pieces of the rocket in a vertical-assembly building.
It was the first time in nearly 50 years that a massive rocket topped with a spacecraft bound for the moon was standing in Kennedy Space Center’s vehicle assembly building.
The completed stacking of the powerful SLS moon rocket was an important milestone, signaling the final stretch of its development.
All in all, NASA has spent 17 years and an estimated $50 billion developing the SLS rocket and its Orion spaceship, according to The Planetary Society.
NASA then practiced a launch, stopping just before the rocket would lift off, in a test called a wet dress rehearsal.
Finally, on August 16, the 23-story rocket was hoisted atop a crawler and pulled out of the Vehicle Assembly Building.
The rocket rolled 4 miles through the dark to Launch Pad 39B. Traveling at a glacial pace of 1 to 2 miles per hour, the trek took more than 10 hours.
This wasn’t the rocket’s first rollout. NASA had to move it in and out of the assembly building as the launch date was delayed.
Then technical issues and hurricanes delayed launch a few more months, as SLS sat and waited.
The rocket finally lifted off and screamed through the skies for the first time at 1:47 a.m. ET on Wednesday.
The spaceship is scheduled to splash down in the ocean, completing the mission, on December 11.
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An astronaut who was onboard a SpaceX mission said he saw rainforests burning and dried-up lakes from space as a result of climate change.
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Matthias Maurer, a European Space Agency astronaut, said on Thursday during a talk at the World Economic Forum at Davos that people had asked him whether he could see the impact of the climate crisis on Earth from space.
He said that although the climate crisis takes effect over a long period of time, he could see indications that Earth is suffering.
When observing Earth from space, you can see dark green areas, which are rainforests, and light green areas, which are agricultural areas, Maurer said.
“Somehow there are very, very many fires exactly on the border between the dark green and the light green,” he said. “That’s when you understand people are burning down the rainforests to create more room for agriculture.”
“Then you fly further on and you see like desert areas, and you think shouldn’t there be a lake here? In my maps, there’s a lake,” he said. “And it’s gone. You don’t see anything.”
Rising temperatures across the world have triggered heatwaves, droughts, heavy rainfall, and wildfires, according to research. Astronauts understand that the climate crisis is happening, but satellite data can provide far more insights on the matter, Maurer said.
Other astronauts have spoken out about how they’ve seen the damage that the climate crisis has done to Earth. NASA astronaut Megan McArthur previously told Insider’s Morgan McFall-Johnsen she was “saddened to see fires over huge sections of the Earth, not just the United States.”
Maurer was part of SpaceX’s Crew-3 mission, which shuttled four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on behalf of NASA in November 2021. They remained on the ISS for six months, conducting scientific experiments, before returning back to Earth in May 2022.