[ExI] How will air travel work in a green solar economy?

[Keith Henson]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 3:37 PM,   "Robert G Kennedy III, PE"
<robot at ultimax.com> wrote:

snip
>
> Yes, hundreds of Mt. Other than a first prototype article, we're not
> thinking of boosting any of it off Earth. Too dang expensive. For a
> project of this scale, it's off-world materials or nothing.

I suggest that even the prototype might be built of asteroid materials.

Though if sunshades come after power satellites, the transport cost
can't be very high.

> Now, I will concede that 2/3 of that mass in space is driven by the
> power generation function we're piggybacking on the sunshade function.

If you are mainly after energy, and building up space industry so it
could build sunshades, it might be better to populate GEO with power
satellites first.  If we eventually tap L1 for energy, the GEO power
sats could be converted to relay stations.  If we were pouring energy
captured at L1 into the earth system, sunshades might be required to
keep the energy gain down.

Keith