Exploding Moon Landers and Solar Panels in Space

Happy Tuesday, everyone! This week’s newsletter is 742 words, a 5-minute read.

Table of Contents

• Cool Stuff You Might Have Missed

• My Dumbest Idea This Week

• Could We Put Billboards In Space?

• A Book Recommendation

• Please Send Me Feedback!

Cool Stuff You Might Have Missed

1. Astrobotic’s Peregrine moon lander is on its way back to Earth. It failed shortly after takeoff due to a propellant leak. (SpaceNews.com)

2. SpaceX completed its 300th successful mission, launching 23 more Starlink satellites into orbit. (Space.com)

3. NASA and Lockheed Martin revealed their new experimental quiet supersonic aircraft, the X-39. (NASA.gov)

My Dumbest Idea This Week

The Premise: Put giant solar panels in orbit around the earth to generate energy for us 24/7 without taking up space on land. It’s sort of like a baby step toward a Dyson Sphere.

3 reasons why it’s cool:

1. Continuous sunlight. The Earth has a problem that even our greatest scientists can’t seem to solve - it spins. Half of it isn’t in the sun for half the day, so solar panels can’t generate power continuously. Solar panels in orbit wouldn’t have this issue as long as they’re far enough away from Earth to mostly avoid its shadow.

2. Weather. Pesky clouds and our annoying atmosphere block sunlight from reaching solar panels on the ground. Again, we wouldn’t have this issue with solar panels in space.

3. Mr. Worldwide. The spacefaring solar panels could beam energy all across the globe, fixing our current problem of energy imbalances in different parts of the world.

3 reasons why it’s dumb:

1. It’s ridiculously expensive. This is a common theme with space-bound payloads, for now. SpaceX advertises a ~$1200/pound cost for launching to Low Earth Orbit. At 40 pounds a solar panel (plus more for necessary components) that’s a lot of Benjamins for not that much green energy.

2. Giant solar death ray. Similar to last week’s issue of putting giant mirrors in space, beaming high amounts of energy back to Earth could cause some unintended damage to anything that gets between our solar panels and our ground-based power stations.

3. Environmental Issues. One of the main benefits of solar power is saving the turtles, right? Well, it’s tough to justify saving the turtles with solar panels when we have to light a few hundred thousand gallons of melted dinosaurs on fire to get them into space.

3 ✨slightly✨ less-dumb alternatives:

1. Use space-based solar power to fuel space-based activities. Manufacturing in space is a really cool concept that I’ll definitely write about in the future. If we’re going to send solar panels into space, we might as well use the energy in space rather than send it home.

2. Just put the solar panels on the ground. Seriously. According to smart people, we’d only need 21,000 square miles of solar panels to power the entire United States. That’s a 145-mile by 145-mile patch of unused desert land in Arizona or something.

3. Build solar arrays on the moon. The real estate there is even cheaper than it is in Arizona, since it’s being used for literally nothing at all. It would still cost a lot to get the panels there, but we could eventually build them on the moon and use them to power a moon colony.

Could We Put Billboards In Space?

TL;DR - The next frontier for the advertising industry could be mile-long space-based billboards orbiting the Earth.

I wrote an article this week on Medium about the potential for putting orbiting billboards in space that we could see from Earth. You can check it out here:

A Book Recommendation

I finished reading A Brief Welcome to the Universe by Neil deGrasse Tyson & Friends.

I’m going to send out a full book review this weekend. I’ll start doing these monthly, since they’re a fun way for me to share cool books while motivating myself to read more.

Check it out here:

Please Send Me Feedback!

Should I do book reviews? Should I cover space news in more detail? Is there something specific you’d like me to write about next week?

I’d greatly appreciate any feedback or suggestions.

Thanks as always.

-Michael