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Isn't the moon a better place to build a solar powered thin film factory? Build the whole thing into a single starship, or series of starships and use an EM lau
by sitkack 6y ago
Isn't the moon a better place to build a solar powered thin film factory? Build the whole thing into a single starship, or series of starships and use an EM launcher to leave the surface.
100T launch every day for 20 years is a lotta launches.
- rbanffy 6y agoWe'd need to manufacture most of the mass on the Moon and rail launch it. It's still a lot of launches, but they could use the sails themselves for braking when arriving at L1. Would take a couple years to get there, but most of the mass could be the parasol itself.
- sitkack 6y agoLunar soil is 1500kg/m^3 and the average lunar density is 3300kg/m^3 So 100T of moon is not hard to come up with. I wonder if the shade can basically be a really thin sheet of aluminum foil. How aluminum foil is made (on earth) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LolDAOxdLxk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LolDAOxdLxk I was thinking about this before, I was wondering if you could heat a ball of metal on a shaft and then spin the shaft so that the ball pancakes out and the rotational force pulls the sheet into an extremely flat disk. Manufacturing in low g could enable entirely different construction techniques. Maybe something like https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924424721000650 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092442472...
- rbanffy 6y agoThat's probably how it would be done, with whatever is the most easily available viable material there. Metallurgy on the Moon will be very interesting - there is the low gravity and the vacuum to play with.