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From Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now:
Virgin Galactic proudly touts the fact that each of the passengers who will fly into sub-orbital space on its SpaceShip2 will emit less carbon dioxide than a typical air passenger on a flight from New York to London. But some scientists say carbon dioxide emissions are irrelevant to measuring the greenhouse gas footprint of the nascent space tourism industry. The big threat from the scaling-up of space travel, they say, comes from something called black carbon-a type of particulate matter that, when hurled into the stratosphere, builds up for years, absorbing visible light from the sun. According to one study, black carbon emitted into the stratosphere by rockets would absorb 100,000 times as much energy as the CO2 emitted by those rockets.
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Re: Space Tourism's Black Carbon Problem
