this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Many small ones implies a huge and ongoing launch schedule.
And no, if we do this, we're not going to stop burning fossil fuels, or remove significant amounts of carbon — schemes like this mostly serve as propaganda for the fossil fuels industry to create continued permission to extract and burn.
How would many small ones imply a huge and oncoming launch schedule, especially if you are using an L1 array? It’s much easier to repair and refuel a field of cubesats already on site than to get them there in the first place after all.
Moreover, why would orbital shades and or mirrors mean that we keep buring fossil fuels? We would be near net zero before such an array would being anywhere near complete enough to compensate for anything, and more to the point such an array would not serve as continued permission for fossil fuel companies, as it does nothing to address the majority of ecological effects such as ocean acidification.
The whole point of such an array is to save tens of millions of lives which will otherwise be ended by the damage already done long before they were even born by blunting more violent storms and reversing sea level rise, not exactly a carbon offset.
Because they're going to fail and drift out of position over time.
Remember here: we don't have any real history of maintaining stuff up there. It goes up, and is used until it fails, and then replaced. There are a couple exceptions in low earth orbit, but that's it.
These things are by definition light sails that can move around just by tilting by a tenth of a degree, they wouldn’t use fuel for station keeping.
Even then, docking to a dead spacecraft and towing it to a nearby repair facility isn’t exactly a great feat beyond our imagination, even if haveing the cubesats slowly return to the station for repair after one gyro fails but before the other redundant ones do fails. Building such an array in the first place requires the sort of space infrastructure necessary to maintain it.
Moreover I find the appeal to having never tried something before to be a silly argument to bring into a climate discussion. After all, we don’t have any real history of running a large scale grid on renewables like solar and wind, so why bother testing or even researching it? Better to stick to powering things with coal and natural gas.
Don't bother, this guy is going to keep nickel and diming your clearly hypothetical topic. Obviously if we all tried, we could achieve your plan even if there are failures and ongoing work to maintain it.
For a few years, yes.
And no, i don't think so, but there is no hard facts we can argue about here, its possible that they would use that, but its not likely that it would work.