this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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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.