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Green Launch is a company making a Hydrogen Impulse Launch System to deliver payloads into low Earth orbit. It is in concept a spin-off of the SHARP project which ended 1998.
The Green Launch system is based on the light-gas gun technology, using hydrogen gas as the working fluid and natural gas, electric grid or solar power as the energy source. Heating and pre-pressurizing the hydrogen working gas takes place before the launch and most of the hydrogen is recovered by a muzzle muffler at the end of the launch tube to be reused for subsequent launches.
The proposed launcher is designed to give projectiles an initial speed of 6 km/s (3.7 mi/s) while mean orbital velocity needed to maintain a stable low Earth orbit is about 7.8 km/s. The projectile design therefore must include an aero shell and a one-stage rocket which circularizes the orbit once the vehicle is in space. The total delta-v needed to achieve low Earth orbit with the Green Launch system starts around 9.0 km/s when accounting for losses due to the atmosphere etc. The designed payloads may include spacecraft, satellites, consumable supplies such as water or fuel to supply a propellant depot in orbit.
