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When two rockets crash-landed during test launches at a remote spaceport on Alaska’s Kodiak Island in 2018, the unspent fuel on board bled into the ground at the launch site, contaminating more than 230 tons of soil. As the commercial space industry booms, the botched launches illustrate another complication the industry will have to figure out: how to clean up the trail of pollution it leaves behind.
The rockets quickly came down where they launched at the Pacific Spaceport Complex. That’s where Astra Space, a relatively new venture that also goes by the name Stealth Space Company, held its first attempts at a suborbital launch in 2018, and both failed, New Scientist reported on September 30th. Astra Space didn’t respond to The Verge’s…