Ten-year-old Jose Hernandez tried to stay extra still as he held the rabbit-ear antennas in place on his parents' fuzzy black-and-white television on Dec. 7, 1972. He couldn't miss a second of the final Apollo mission. As he watched Gene Cernan become the 11th person to walk on the moon, Hernandez knew he wanted to be an astronaut.

Nearly 40 years, two engineering degrees and 11 NASA rejections later, the Space Shuttle carried Hernandez to the International Space Station on the 159th manned NASA spaceflight.

During his two weeks in space he knew he wanted to see a 250-mile-high sunrise. As he watched the sun's rays appear over the Earth's horizon and hit the atmosphere, he had what he calls an "Aha!" moment.

"It looks so fragile from up there," he said. "It looks so scary thin. And to think that's the only thing that's keeping us alive. It looks like a very delicate balance."

That balance may be threatened in the future by the very thing that rocketed Hernandez to his "Aha!" moment. Humanity's thirst for the unknown has the potential to harm to our environment.

The commercial space age could be a boost for the space industry, but with some unintended consequences.

Rocket launches have been increasing since the mid-2000s after an overall decline that started in the late 1980s. In the last year the number of launches increased by about 30%, the highest increase since 1963. Since 2005 rockets launches have more than doubled from about 50 launches to over 100.

Commercial space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin and more are looking to create what some have dubbed "the new space age."

And with more rockets sent into space comes a crucial window to study how emissions are affecting the environment, according to Martin Ross of the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, Calif. and James Vedda of the Center for Space Policy and Strategy in Arlington, Va.

Chemicals from rockets mix with the ozone layer, harming the atmosphere. Until recently, very few have cared about the issue, in part because emissions have been negligible, and there are virtually no regulations.

The limited data that Ross has collected since he started studying rocket emissions in the 1990s shows just a 0.1% decrease in ozone caused by rocket launches.

However, the rocket industry is growing. Space agencies have already publicly scheduled about 70 launches for 2019. If launch rates increase in the way experts predict, ozone loss from rocket emissions could rise to about 3%.

That's a global ozone loss similar to that of "ozone depleting substances," which the Montreal Protocol, a global agreement to protect stratospheric ozone, started banning in the late 1980s.

And just a 1% decrease in ozone could cause more than a 2% increase in skin cancer, according to a study by physics, dermatology and cancer risk experts in the Netherlands. That corresponds to nearly 100,000 new cases in the United States.

When Ross first started studying rocket emissions, ozone depletion "was the big thing," he said. Some kinds of rocket engines put chlorine into the atmosphere, like the ones on the boosters to the space shuttle.

"So everybody was freaking out," said Ross. Some called for agencies to ban those kinds of rockets. But after Ross worked with the Air Force to collect some data, they found that the effects of those rockets were very low.

By the early 2000s, the scientific frenzy died down, said Ross.

"Everyone's saying, 'Well rockets don't do much. The global launch rates are declining. So why worry about it.' But then the launch rate trend kind of flipped in 2005 and it's been growing ever since then," he said. "And it could begin to grow really fast. So we'd better take another look at this."

The continued absence of current rocket emissions data will have consequences. Vedda fears a "knee jerk" reaction to the issue that could stop launches, which would "throw a pretty sizable monkey wrench into all kinds of space operations." By that time, chemicals from rocket launches could have already made a sizable dent in the ozone.

Emissions remain negligible because the number of launches are so low. Agencies will not pass regulations until they reach what Ross and Vedda call the "tipping point" of rocket emission regulation: When launch rates increase enough to cross paths with "international efforts to protect stratospheric ozone." Collecting information now is essential for mitigating problems that could come with regulation.

"That's why we want to get the data ahead of time so we avoid this kind of bubbling and knee jerk reaction that happens in the absence of data," said Ross. Because any knee-jerk reaction could be detrimental to space travel which would also be detrimental to human progress.

The scientific and space communities are starting to recognize rocket emissions as an issue, but slower than some want.

Some data collection started in June 2018, when the FAA's Airport Cooperative Research Program partnered with Blue Ridge Consulting, Inc. to begin creating a model for rocket emissions tests.

Blue Ridge Consulting CFO Josh Mellon could say little about the project, as its completion date isn't until May 2020, except for that it's modeled after the FAA's Aviation Environmental Design Tool, which helps estimate aircraft emissions.

Rockets present a different challenge from aircraft emissions because rockets pass directly through the stratosphere, the layer that contains ozone and starts at about 43,000 feet above the ground, above where airplanes normally fly. Chemicals from rockets accumulate in this part of the atmosphere for years before the effects can be measured.

But despite this difference, using aircraft emission regulation as a model for rocket emissions could work, according to Dr. Richard Miake-Lye, a researcher from Aerodyne Research who has worked closely with NASA and the FAA for years studying aircraft emissions.

"The aviation world is very engaged in making sure that the science is done right and then sensible regulations get put in place that everybody is happy with - including industry," he said. "And that could happen for rockets as well."

A few years ago, Miake-Lye said the FAA asked him to apply his knowledge of aircraft emissions to rockets. He said the Environmental Design Tool has the potential to find and collect data on rocket emissions, which can "then can be handed off to atmospheric scientists to turn the crank and say, 'This is what the emissions are doing today. This is what they'll do in 10 years, 20 years, 100 years.'"

Miake-Lye also works with the International Civil Aviation Organization, which is a United Nations agency with the goal of monitoring aviation issues. The ICAO has a database which monitors aircraft emissions, and Miake-Lye said he thinks a similar one could work for space travel.

And while the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs has yet to cover the rocket emissions issue specifically, there is work in progress to assess the overall environmental impacts of space travel, said UNOOSA Scientific Affairs Officer Jorge Del Rio Vera.

Del Rio Vera also said that they have incorporated the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer into their study. And for the first time, the Protocol's 2018 Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion addresses rocket emissions as more than what Ross calls a "passing thought."

The assessment, conducted through the World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations Environment Programme, NASA, NOAA and the European Commission, calls for further study of the effects of rocket emissions on the ozone, which the FAA's emissions modeling project could provide.

Miake-Lye stressed that while it has been a slow start to the rocket emissions issue, at least it's a start.

"You could argue that we should gear up and be spending many millions of dollars to do this quicker faster and better," he said. "Things happen slower than scientists would like but it is starting to get going."

The people and companies that build rockets don't think about rocket emissions because they don't have to, yet.

Experts cite several reasons why studying rocket emissions has been so slow to start. One of them is the disconnect between the science community and the engineering community. Ross said the two communities talk very little, especially with the new commercialized space age growing.

Miake-Lye said that because space is becoming such a "massive" industry, space companies don't want to tell their competitors what kinds of launch systems they are using, which would be identified in data on their emissions.

"It's not that the rocket people are totally opposed to thinking about that," Miake-Lye said of rocket emissions impacts. "But without any regulatory pressure it's kind of hard to force people to tell us very precisely what your rockets spit out. They like to keep things proprietary."

Michelle Hanlon, a space lawyer and co-founder of the space preservation organization, For All Moonkind agreed that regulatory pressure is one of the ways to get that line of communication to open up. But regulation must come in "incremental steps," she said.

Both Hanlon and Miake-Lye said it could harm the industry if, 10 years down the road, companies find out that the technology they're using is regulated and they have to stop flying certain rockets.

"If they get ample lead time, then corrective measures can be taken," Miake-Lye said.

Not only did Hanlon point out that U.S.-specific regulations happening too quickly could make the U.S. less competitive with other countries, quick rocket fuel regulations would be a waste of time and money.

NASA rocket engineer Jim Snoddy said it can take up to a decade to build a rocket engine.

"If you told me to go build you and new one tomorrow, the fastest I could ever make the first copy of it is three years. Then it would take me three years to work all the bugs out if it and go into production," he said. "It's a long time from the design to the development."

So rocket engineers rarely have the time or the need to worry about the emissions of the rockets that they build.

"I'm not an environmentalist," said Snoddy, who has built NASA rockets for three decades. "I'm a rocket guy."

Different rocket fuels create different challenges for scientists trying to study rocket emissions.

The engineers in Huntsville, Alabama who built the rockets sent to the moon taught Snoddy what he knows today.

And while he admits to not being in tune with the rocket emissions issue, he said he had no problem telling scientists "what actually came out of the back of a rocket." He said he was one of the only NASA engineers who agreed to speak at FAA's annual Aviation Emissions Characterization Research Roadmap Meeting in May 2018, along with Dr. Miake-Lye.

"A rocket engine is the equivalent of something like the Hoover Dam put in the back of your truck," Snoddy said. "The amount of energy and horsepower that comes out of a rocket engine is just unimaginable."

But it's the different kinds of rocket fuels that create another challenge for those who are trying to study rocket emissions.

Engineers use four main types of rocket fuels, and there's one more in testing. All consist of a material to burn, and a material to ignite, which is different from airplane or car engines where the oxygen in the air is already there to burn the fuel. Rocket engines don't have that luxury. They have to carry their own oxygen.

Some of the first engineers used different propellants than engineers use today, such as alcohol. But it wasn't dense or "energetic" enough for engineers to keep using it, Snoddy said.

The main liquid propellants are kerosene, hydrogen and hypergolic fuels, which could be a number of combinations of chemicals, making the fuel unstable and therefore toxic to handle. Solid rocket motors are like taking a piece of rubber tire from a car, and mixing it with aluminum and a salt to get a solid substance, according to Snoddy.

SpaceX has also started testing a methane-fueled rocket, of which scientists have studied the environmental effects even less than the other four kinds of rockets, due to how new it is.

Solid rocket motors' emissions have been the most studied out of all the different kinds of fuels. NASA's Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars 2020 mission explicitly states that it isn't even possible to estimate the global impact of liquid propellants for specific missions.

There are pros and cons of each kind of fuel, some more damaging to the stratosphere than others. Because it's such a time of variety in rocket fuels, Miake-Lye said he thinks it's a good time to study the them.

"And then with that in hand, consider what regulations would be best for the environment and if we could maybe look at technologies that are cleaner rather than dirtier to minimize the impacts as things move forward," he said.

The space industry is advancing rapidly, so it's hard for policy makers to keep up.

Moving forward is exactly the goal of this new space age, and that ingenuity is increasing the launch rate faster than regulations can keep up with.

"Small satellites are more capable than they've ever been," said Veronica Foreman, a payload engineer at Virgin Orbit, a commercial space company that launches small satellites from a rocket attached to the bottom of a 747 jet, which allows them to launch from anywhere in the world. This allows their satellites to get to orbits that satellites launching from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida or Vandenberg Air Force Base in California would have a harder time getting to.

She described the evolution of satellites as similar to that of phones. They're now smaller, better and faster so they have a lot more possible uses. Companies can use satellites images to monitor parking lots and the health of brick- and- mortar stores. Others have tried to predict the amount of global oil reserves by looking at the shadows within oil reserve tanks, Foreman said.

Small satellites are more powerful in what scientists and engineers call a castellation, which is a system of two or more satellites working together. If a company or government wanted a constellation of about six satellites, it could launch eight. Even if two fail, six working satellites would remain. Those six small satellites working together could do the same work or more as a big satellite that could fail with bigger consequences.

"They also generally have a higher risk tolerance and they don't have to be perfect," said Foreman. "That's a really good thing. So that has given rise to kind of like the next generation of constellations."

It's a "vastly different paradigm than what you saw for most of the space age," Vedda said. "That is a big part of the driver of why the launches are going to increase."

Space advancement is good for humanity, and rocket emissions data can help protect it.

This new paradigm could end up being a very good thing. In the past, new space technologies lead to what are now vital elements of society on earth.

Hernandez was a part of a team that helped to build the first full-field digital mammography machine to detect early forms of breast cancer. The technology was built originally for rocket defense lasers designed to destroy Soviet missiles. After the Soviet Union broke up, Hernandez and his team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory figured out how to use the technology for something else.

"We had developed such good technology," he said. "They were telling us to document that technology, mothball everything and it gets put away, and maybe one day it'll be used. My boss and I said, 'No we've got something real good here.'"

And that's not the only technology that scientists created for space that now makes human life better.

The Apollo missions are the reason it's safe to drink pool water because the astronauts needed a way to purify water that wouldn't require a lot of power and wouldn't need to be monitored all the time. That technology is now in many pools.

Scientists working on the Ariane missions needed cameras small enough for space, but good enough for science. That technology is now in cellphone cameras.

Satellites launched into orbit study earth science like weather patterns, climate changes and global warming. Other satellites provide television, internet, and cell phone coverage.

Through their work, the science community and the space community really want the same thing: progress. And studying rocket emissions is just one way to protect and lead that progress.

"The bottom line is that you have to get the involved community more solidly aware of this stuff, and with a good library of solid data so that they can comprehend it all before you can go out to the broader public and try and get them to understand," said Ross.

And getting information to the broader public, Hanlon said, starts early.

"I believe that space has to be entered into the curriculum of kindergarten," she said. "Every child from from kindergarten ought to be able to say, 'look there's a satellite up there, and it can tell me how many cars are in that parking lot.'"

Jose Hernandez also supports space education, having created education programs of his own.

"I wish world leaders would have this same opportunity, and one day they will," he said. "And I guarantee you the planet would be a much better place after that."