[ANewFormation]

The interesting thing about this is that rockets can easily be net negative in terms of CO2 stuff.

One way is in the fuel itself. For instance the Space Shuttle main engine was powered by combustion generated from liquid hydrogen + liquid oxygen - the exhaust was literally water vapor.

A second interesting nuance is that any fuel burnt outside of Earth's atmosphere is a carbon reduction, so a hypothetical rocket that could get out of the atmosphere on 50% of its fuel would be net neutral/negative.

[thrance]

How is that negative? The hydrogen still had to be extracted from purified water, the rocket still had to be designed, forged, moved, cooled, etc.

Also wouldn't the carbon dioxide burned outside of the atmosphere eventually comes back down? The nozzle is usually pointed towards the Earth, so unless the exhaust is on an escape trajectory it wouldn't be lost.