The first episode of Discovery Project Earth tonight involves putting mirrors into space to deflect the light from the sun to cool the planet a bit. One of the things they did was launch a rocket with a couple of lenses in it to see if the ultra thin lenses could withstand the launch vibrations.
The first thing I noticed is that they picked the same team of people who helped the guys from Top Gear do the Reliant Space Orbiter. That ended in an epic failure with a huge fireball. The lens launcher also ended in failure, but not so a not so epic fashion.
Granted these rockets are highly complex, but so far the rocket builders are 0 for 2 on televised rocket launches. Not that great of a start if they happen to get business from people watching the two respective shows.
The sunshield idea is interesting, but to we need more stuff floating between Earth and the Sun? What happens if you plan a space mission and happen to cross the path of where these little lenses are at? You risk damage to the spacecraft and you wasted whatever number of lenses that happen to get hit and destroyed.
It is an off the wall idea, but things can be helped if people start taking responsibility for what they introduce into the environment.
In other global warming rants, what bugs me are the people against nuclear power. It’s a great power source that will last for years without needing fuel rod changing. Granted there is a disposal problem, but you can either dig a huge hole in the ground and stick it there or launch it to the moon and stick it in a huge hole in the ground there. No one lives on the moon yet and I doubt any will be for quite a while. We’ve proven that we can build roving vehicles to explore Mars, lets build one to organize radioactive waste in one central part of the Moon. Getting to the Moon was fairly routine in the 70’s, and with the vast increase in knowledge since then, we can pretty much hit whatever spot we want to on the Moon.
What gets me is – at an estimated cost of 100 Trillion or so, it will never happen, There would be a million less expensive ways to accomplish the same thing even if you spent 100 million doing the research to find less expensive ideas. Wait, let me save you 100 million… Why do we need lenses? they will only scatter the light if they are oriented properly – no mention of any nano-motors so apparently they will be orietned randomly, Id guess about 15% of them would do anything useful.
Why not just generate a dust cloud that actually scatters light at 100% efficiency?
Toss a bunch of chalk blocks out along an arc and blow them into fine particulate clouds. Would require less distance to be covered by the “lens” and light would be refracted more efficiently because every particle would have a sun facing “side” that did its job.
I think dust clouds would be cheaper to manufacture then micron thick lenses – maybe just blow up a passing comet or 30
Really sounds like non-sense to me.
i wonder if we can use different approach, instead of using lenses we can use reflective spheres, in this case we don’t need to worry about the alignment with the sun, we need only to use light, strong, and reflective material.
and more over for packaging or sending these spheres out to space, we can use also a spherical container to hold several reflective objects inside, but usually we use a rocket to be used in such mission, but in “sphere rocket” we don’t need to have only a strait coil gun path or tube, but we can make the tube longer by using different shapes, one of these shapes we might use is “Quarter-Circle”, its a crazy idea but imagine we can use longer lunching tube for the coil gun on the ground.