Open Letter to Elon Musk & SpaceX

We live in a world of crisis, and none greater than Global Warming.

The problem is not really industry or fossil fuels or technologies, it is 100% a problem of governance. Global, all the way down to local.

Regardless of accords or conventions and agreements, the fundamental problems of governance remain. Some countries are accomplishing improvements and most are not.

Great progress has been made. I grew up in a Los Angeles of brown skies in the 1950s & 1960s, water pollution, and growth development at any cost. I lived through periods where great lakes caught on FIRE! But the United States is now one of the cleanest countries on the planet, yet it is not enough and will never be enough.

Industry cannot solve this without sweeping governance changes, and the losers will be the middle class and the poor. Because it is us that are expected to bear the costs and suffer job losses, food scarcity, and poverty in silence. Employment is the most unstable it has been in a century as technologies sweep through the markets like wildfires.

Yet, something must be done.

I live in Miami, as doomed a city as Venice, Amsterdam, and New York. We will not survive sea level rises.

But there is a solution so elegantly simple that only an ex-NAZI rocket scientist could have thought it up. In the 1960's Verner Von Braun gave an interview to a newsman (my father) by phone about how "satellites" could be used to improve agricultural production. I was allowed to listen in and never forgot it.

This idea he voiced was simple. Place a mirror in geosynchronous orbit shining down on farming regions to increase the growing day. Unfortunately, it would also cause increased temperature - but the idea of geoengineering in the idea has merit, especially for Mars. But for Earth we would need to do the opposite. We would need to net-reduce sunlight (thermal energy) reaching the Earth.

Ironically, the very first U.S. communications satellite used this idea. Project Echo was the first passive communications satellite experiment. Each of the two American spacecraft, launched in 1960 and 1964, were metalized balloon satellites acting as passive reflectors of microwave signals. They were reflectors!

And they were the last of their type.

Fast forward 60 years. What do we need to do to control global warming?

We need to obviously scale back on greenhouse gas emissions, but can we do it in time to avoid catastrophic results? Probably not. But there is another way to control the problem for a hundred years that it will take us to become better custodians of our planet.

A Crazy Idea

That other way is a sunscreen! Use a reflector or opaque-plastic sheet to block a tiny amount of sunlight.

We don't have to block much, perhaps 1% would be enough, maybe 2% - to lower overall thermal energies reaching the atmosphere and the surface. And ironically, you Elon Musk and SpaceX are (perhaps) the only entity on the planet that can solve this!

The idea is to create a thin-film polymer (dense enough to block visible & IR light) sunscreen perhaps 1-2km in diameter, positioned in a stable orbit between the Sun and the Earth - positioned at a distance so that the sunscreen would eclipse the sun for minutes each day. It would be in a synchronous orbit tracking the earth and rotating to achieve eclipse and reduce solar radiation sufficient for the purpose. Holding it in position would be a challenge, but you and your company are rocket scientists likely up to that challenge.

The entire satellite sunscreen could probably be carried aboard your heavy lifter with an additional booster to place it in solar orbit. Perhaps add an auto-destruct after 50-100 years so it would not have a long lifespan.

After all, this is not that much different than the ideas for solar-sails. Space science has become very good at unfolding large complex fragile structures in space as well (such as the JWT).

The rocket science would be left to you. But the idea of directly reducing the source of most of our heat would work, especially if we are very conservative in what we reduce. We could also augment this with the shading of critical regions such as Antarctica and the Arctic to provide faster cooling there.

No single government will have the will to solve the global climate problem, yet you can, and do it within a short span of time. Additionally, the technology can also be used in new novel ways for expanded solar electric generation on the moon, and raising the temperature on Mars.

Obviously, this would need to be a global alliance to govern it after deployment, but let the bureaucrats chew on that.

But you could be the savior of the world!

What do you say, are you up for a challenge?

Most sincerely,

Tim McGuinness Ph.D.

For those of you reading this, if you know Elon or folks at SpaceX please forward it to them. Thanks.