"In August of this year, Rahul Goel will stand on the rocky cliffs of St. Lawrence, NL, watching a plume of fire rip across the sky.
If everything goes right, his company, NordSpace, will make history by orchestrating Canada’s first commercial rocket launch.
Canada was the fourth nation in the world to launch a satellite into space, helped pioneer aerospace engineering, and famously built the Canadarm. But for all its expertise, Canada has never launched a rocket from its own soil. Every satellite, every national security payload, every commercial launch is outsourced, mostly to the US."
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I agree that having the government do it would be ideal, though a government could fumble it just as bad or worse than any private company. I’ll take a flawed domestic starlink/rocket launches over none at all. Especially if the alternative means relying on America/Musk even more.
I don’t know about the toxins from launches, but I think it must be a drop in the bucket compared to air travel, cars, and dirty electricty generation. If that is what it takes to get us space infrastructure, I’d call that the cost of doing business. I also have faith that there can be reasonable way to mitigate the damage such as choice of where they are launched and further developing the technology. Much of the tech has gone largely unchanged from the moon landing era, afaik.