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Fleet of spacecraft could block catastrophic global warming mongabay.com November 9, 2006 In a paper to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Roger Angel, Director of the Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory and the Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics, proposes launching "trillions of small free-flying spacecraft a million miles above Earth" into the L-1 orbit, an orbit aligned with the sun. A news release from NASA explains:
"The earlier ideas were for bigger, heavier structures that would have needed manufacture and launch from the moon, which is pretty futuristic," Angel said. "I wanted to make the sunshade from small 'flyers,' small, light and extremely thin spacecraft that could be completely assembled and launched from Earth, in stacks of a million at a time. When they reached L1, they would be dealt off the stack into a cloud. There's nothing to assemble in space." NASA explains further:
The total mass of all the fliers making up the space sunshade structure would be 20 million tons. At $10,000 a pound, conventional chemical rocket launch is prohibitively expensive. Angel proposes using a cheaper way developed by Sandia National Laboratories for electromagnetic space launchers, which could bring cost down to as little as $20 a pound. The sunshade could be deployed by a total 20 electromagnetic launchers launching a stack of flyers every 5 minutes for 10 years. The electromagnetic launchers would ideally run on hydroelectric power, but even in the worst-case environmental scenario with coal-generated electricity, each ton of carbon used to make electricity would mitigate the effect of 1000 tons of atmospheric carbon.
While the two-tenths of one percent figure is lower than other estimates projected by scientists, Angel warns that the sunshield is not a permanent solution. "The sunshade is no substitute developing renewable energy, the only permanent solution. A similar massive level of technological innovation and financial investment could ensure that," he said. "But if the planet gets into an abrupt climate crisis that can only be fixed by cooling, it would be good to be ready with some shading solutions that have been worked out." This article uses excerpts and quotes from a November 3, 2006 NASA news release. Recommend this article? Comments? >Digg this article | >Hugg this article | Contact News options SHARE THIS ARTICLE:
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