Launching material or people into orbit requires a serious amount of energy. All of today’s solutions to provide transportation into orbit use fossil fuels. Even the ULA Delta IV Heavy, which uses pure hydrogen and oxygen,obtains liquid hydrogen from non-renewable sources, as well as the huge amounts of energy required to distill LOX.
Many companies are using RP-1 and LOX combinations and on top of the megatons of CO2 emissions per rocket, also deposit soot and nitrogen oxides into the upper atmosphere where it takes longer to dissipate.
Orbital Bridge is something new! It uses only sunlight in the form of a 400 MW solar farm, and pure distilled water, which is drawn from the ocean and distilled with a portion of the power from the solar farm. Energy from the solar farm is dumped into the distilled water, which can carry 1.9 MJ of energy per liter at payload temperature and pressure. It is also used to accelerate the maglev linear accelerator sled to hypersonic velocities.
While water vapor is considered a green house gas, it is the fastest of all the gasses to be naturally recycled as rain, where it returns to the oceans eventually. Even high stratospheric water vapor condenses into crystals and begins the journey down to Earth.
Orbital Bridge is Zero Carbon. Zero Emissions of any sort other than pure water vapor. The Orbital Bridge launch facility will have one significant impact where ever it is installed, in that it will very likely increase local rain fall, as well as increase the albedo of the area somewhat due to increased cloud cover. We are guessing there are plenty of places along the equator that would welcome such an environmental change with open arms.
