Outer Space

Could a Giant Parasol in Outer Space Help Solve the Climate Crisis?

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Interest in sun shields, once a fringe idea, has grown. Now, a team of scientists says it could launch a prototype within a few years.

It’s come to this. With Earth at its hottest point in recorded history, and humans doing far from enough to stop its overheating, a small but growing number of astronomers and physicists are proposing a potential fix that could have leaped from the pages of science fiction: The equivalent of a giant beach umbrella, floating in outer space.

The idea is to create a huge sunshade and send it to a far away point between the Earth and the sun to block a small but crucial amount of solar radiation, enough to counter global warming. Scientists have calculated that if just shy of 2 percent of the sun’s radiation is blocked, that would be enough to cool the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 Fahrenheit, and keep Earth within manageable climate boundaries.

The idea has been at the outer fringes of conversations about climate solutions for years. But as the climate crisis worsens, interest in sun shields has been gaining momentum, with more researchers offering up variations. There’s even a foundation dedicated to promoting solar shields.

A recent study led by the University of Utah explored scattering dust deep into space, while a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is looking into creating a shield made of “space bubbles.” Last summer, Istvan Szapudi, an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, published a paper that suggested tethering a big solar shield to a repurposed asteroid.

Now scientists led by Yoram Rozen, a physics professor and the director of the Asher Space Research Institute at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, say they are ready to build a prototype shade to show that the idea will work.

To block the necessary amount of solar radiation, the shade would have to be about a million square miles, roughly the size of Argentina, Dr. Rozen said. A shade that big would weigh at least 2.5 million tons — too heavy to launch into space, he said. So, the project would have to involve a series of smaller shades. They would not completely block the sun’s light but rather cast slightly diffused shade onto Earth, he said.

Dr. Rozen said his team was ready to design a prototype shade of 100 square feet and is seeking between $10 million and $20 million to fund the demonstration.

“We can show the world, ‘Look, there is a working solution, take it, increase it to the necessary size,’” he said.

The scientists are seeking between $10 million and $20 million to build a smaller model that would demonstrate the concept.CreditCredit…Technion Israel Institute of Technology and Asher Space Research Institute

Proponents say that a sunshade would not eliminate the need to stop burning coal, oil and gas, the main drivers of climate change. Even if greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels were to immediately drop to zero, there’s already excessive heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The Earth’s average temperature is on the brink of rising 1.5 Celsius over the preindustrial average. That’s the point beyond which the chances of extreme storms, drought, heat waves and wildfires would increase significantly and humans and other species would struggle more to survive, scientists say. The planet has already warmed 1.2 degrees Celsius.

Latest News on Climate Change and the Environment

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A giant parasol in outer space? With Earth at its hottest in recorded history, and humans doing far from enough to stop its overheating, a small but growing number of astronomers and physicists are proposing a fix that could have leaped from the pages of science fiction: the equivalent of a giant beach umbrella, floating in outer space.

A compounding effect. A new study found that on days when California experienced both extreme heat and wildfire smoke, there were disproportionate numbers of hospitalizations for heart and lung ailments. The impact was greater in communities with lower income, education, health insurance coverage and tree cover, according to the research.

An acute drought. Climate change fueled the remarkable 2023 drought that drained major rivers, fueled huge wildfires and threatened the livelihoods of millions of people in the Amazon rainforest, scientists said in a new study.

Greenland’s ice sheet. The island’s expansive ice sheet is known to be shrinking, especially since the 1990s, because of warming from climate change. Now, a new study reveals that about 20% more of the Greenland ice sheet has disappeared than previous estimates show, potentially threatening ocean currents that help to regulate global temperatures.

Droughts around the world. The U.N. estimates that 1.84 billion people worldwide, or nearly a quarter of humanity, were living under drought in 2022 and 2023, a vast majority in low- and middle-income countries. The crisis, worsened partly by climate change, has been accompanied by soaring food prices and could have consequences for hunger, elections and migration.

A sunshade would help stabilize the climate, supporters of the idea say, while other climate mitigation strategies were being pursued.

“I’m not saying this will be the solution, but I think everybody has to work toward every possible solution,” said Dr. Szapudi, the astronomer who proposed tethering a sunshade to an asteroid.

It was 1989 when James Early of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory suggested a “space-based solar shield” positioned near a fixed point between the Earth and the sun called Lagrange Point One, or L1, some 932,000 miles away, four times the average distance between the Earth and the moon. There, the gravitational pulls from the Earth and sun cancel each other out.

In 2006, Roger Angel, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, presented his proposal for a deflective sun shield at the National Academy of Sciences and later won a grant from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts to continue his research. He suggested releasing trillions of very lightweight spacecraft at L1, using transparent film and steering technology that would prevent the devices from drifting off orbit.

“It’s just like you just turned a knob down on the sun,” Dr. Angel said, “and you don’t mess with the atmosphere.”

The sunshade idea has its critics, among them Susanne Baur, a doctoral candidate who focuses on solar radiation modification modeling at the European Center for Research and Advanced Training in Scientific Computation in France. A sunshade would be astronomically expensive and could not be implemented in time, given the speed of global warming, she said. In addition, a solar storm or collision with stray space rocks could damage the shield, resulting in sudden, rapid warming with disastrous consequences, Ms. Baur said.

Time and money would be better spent on working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, she said, with a small portion of research devoted to “more viable and cost-effective” solar geoengineering ideas.

But sunshade proponents say that at this stage, reducing greenhouse gas emissions will not go far enough to allay climate chaos, that carbon dioxide removal has proved extremely difficult to realize and that every potential solution ought to be explored.

A fully operational sunshade would have to be resilient and reversible, Dr. Szapudi said. In his proposed design, he said 99 percent of its weight would come from the asteroid, helping offset the cost. It would still likely carry a price tag of trillions of dollars, an amount that is far less than what is spent on military weapons, he said.

The sail would tilt like a slat on a venetian blind, sometimes pointing to the sun and sometimes perpendicular to it.

“Saving the Earth and giving up 10 percent of your weapons to destroy things is actually a pretty good deal in my book,” Dr. Szapudi said.

He held up Tesla as an example of an idea that once seemed wildly ambitious but within 20 years of its founding became the world’s top manufacturer of electric vehicles.

Morgan Goodwin, executive director of the Planetary Sunshade Foundation, a nonprofit organization, said one reason sunshades haven’t gained as much traction is that climate researchers have been focused, quite naturally, on what’s happening within the Earth’s atmosphere and not on space.

But the falling costs of space launches and investments in a space industrial economy have widened possibilities, Mr. Goodwin said. The foundation suggests using raw materials from space and launching solar shade ships into L1 from the moon, which would cost far less than setting off from Earth.

“We think as the idea of sunshades become more understood by climate folks, it’s going to be a pretty obvious part of the discussion,” said Mr. Goodwin, who is also the senior director at the Angeles chapter of the Sierra Club.

The Technion model involves affixing lightweight solar sails to a small satellite sent to L1. Their prototype would move back and forth between L1 and another equilibrium point, with the sail tilting between pointing to the sun and being perpendicular to it, moving like a slat on a venetian blind. This would help keep the satellite stable and eliminate the need for a propulsion system, Dr. Rozen said.

Dr. Rozen said the team was still in the predesign phase but could launch a prototype within three years after securing funds. He estimated that a full-size version would cost trillions (a tab “for the world to pick up, not a single country,” he said) but reduce the Earth’s temperature by 1.5 Celsius within two years.

“We at the Technion are not going to save the planet,” Dr. Rozen said. “But we’re going to show that it can be done.”

Menstruation Suppression In Outer Space: This Is How NASA Astronauts Handle Their Period

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at work
Menstrual suppression is preferred by some female astronauts on long hauls, yet it is available to earth-bound women as well.

American Astronaut Margaret Rhea Seddon logged three separate space flights between 1985 and 1993 for stretches of 7 days, 9 days, and 14 days. In an oral history, Seddon reveals that a lot of NASA scientists expressed concerns before her trips about menstruation. It was, she says, one of the unknowns of space.

“A lot of people predicted retrograde flow of menstrual blood, and it would get out in your abdomen, get peritonitis, and horrible things would happen,” Seddon said. “All the women were going, “I don’t think so.” But you couldn’t prove it or disprove it.”

After convincing the scientists to “consider it a non-problem,” the first female astronaut who had her period in space soon discovered it to be just like having your period on earth, Seddon says, adding that a second debate arose: How many feminine hygiene products get stored onboard the spacecraft?

Today, a likely answer is “none,” according to researchers at King’s College London and Baylor College of Medicine. Having explored the issue, they suggest menstrual suppression may be preferred by female astronauts on longer hauls or for extended visits to the International Space Station (ISS).

Orbital Concerns

In the novel Minus Time, Barbara Urie, a mother and astronaut, attempts to set a record for human space habitation.  “I imagine that my astronaut Barbara, who was very set on being part of a long-term mission, would have chosen to use some kind of menstruation suppression,” author Catherine Bush, tells Medical Daily. “She would likely have chosen something subdermal.”

Since November 2000, the ISS microgravity laboratory has been continuously occupied, hosting an international crew of six people. As they live and work, the crew orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, traveling at a speed of five miles per second. A total of 222 people from 18 countries have visited since 2000, and of those total visitors, 58 were women: 49 Americans (who ranged in age from 26 to 47), eight Soviets, and two Chinese, a NASA spokesperson reports.

“For the most recently chosen class of new astronaut candidates, 4 of the 8 are women,” Dr. Virginia Wotring, senior author and assistant professor at Baylor’s Center for Space Medicine, tells Medical Daily. She explains her menstruation in space study began when Dr. Polk, head of Space Medicine at Johnson Space Center, asked if certain oral contraceptives had a lower risk of blood clots than others. (Using oral contraceptives is linked to doubling the risk of clots.)

“We have now expanded on that question to evaluate the blood clot risk of other contraceptive and/or menses suppression therapies as well,” she says. Wotring and her co-author Dr. Varsha Jain note the practicalities of menstruating during pre-flight training or spaceflight can be challenging. For short duration missions, menstrual cycles can to be timed according to mission dates. Menstrual suppression may be preferable, though full amenities exist for astronauts choosing to menstruate in space.

Seddon recalls doing a “worst case” scenario evaluation, where she attempted to calculate the maximum number of tampons or pads necessary. “Because we didn’t know how it would be different up there…Most of the women said, ‘I would never, ever use that many.’”  According to Seddon, having to pack such an excessive number of feminine hygiene products meant less room to pack other items, including clothes.

Menstrual suppression, then, offers a packing advantage along with other benefits.

Feminine Endurance

“The waste disposal systems onboard the U.S. side of the International Space Station that reclaim water from urine were not designed to handle menstrual blood,” wrote Wotring and Jain. Plus, packaging of feminine hygiene products contributes to “upmass” (total payload carried into space), while also causing additional trash. With limited wash water and potential difficulties with changing a tampon in microgravity, the practicalities of menstrual hygiene during spaceflight might also be challenging.

During long-duration missions, then, some astronauts have taken the combined oral contraceptive (COC) pill to prevent menstrual flow. Yet, the authors predict a three-year exploration class mission would require approximately 1,100 pills, which would add considerable mass and disposal requirements for the flight.

Long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), such as beneath-the-skin implants and IUDs, appear to be safe and reliable methods of suppression while also possessing a number of advantages for spaceflight, say Wotring and Jain.

A LARC would remove upmass, packaging, and waste issues. The device could be inserted prior to a mission with no replacement necessary during flight. In all likelihood, an astronaut using a LARC would be able to perform her tasks unhindered, though preflight testing might be necessary to see whether the implant might rub or catch on an extra-vehicular activity suit or specialist equipment. And, no reports suggest the high gravitational force loads which accompany launch and landing would damage a subdermal implant or shift the position of an IUD.

One issue requiring further study is the effect of hormone treatments on bone mineral density. Both men and women astronauts are known to lose bone at higher rates than on Earth. Previous studies indicate a temporary, higher than usual loss of bone mass density occurs with some contraception options, so further research is needed.

“If we want space missions to be fully human, and bring all of our best attributes as a species to the challenges of being in space, we need both men and women to ‘(hu)man’ these missions,” says Bush.

at work

Until the number of active female astronauts meets the number of participants required for a clinical study, the authors suggest using pharmacological data from spaceflights combined with ground-based studies to investigate potential effects of LARCs during spaceflight.

“LARCs might be appropriate for many women — on Earth and in austere environments like a military deployment,” says Wotring. “Since LARCs may be effective for long periods of time (3 years), they may be especially useful for women who find it difficult to access a clinic or pharmacy on a regular basis.” She adds LARCs are in common use in Europe and the United Kingdom, and women who are considering this option might discuss it with their doctors.

“We’re really hoping to call a little more attention to the wide spectrum contraceptive choicesavailable to all women, as well as to the notion of menses suppression as a potentially desirable side-effect,” Wotring says. Ultimately, she believes it’s a woman’s choice to suppress or not, no matter whether her explorations remain terrestrial or in wondrous space.

Voyager interseller voyage.

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After 36 years, Voyager 1 goes interstellar

The tireless Voyager I spacecraft, launched in the disco era and now more than 11 billion miles from Earth, has become the first man-made object to enter interstellar space, scientists said Thursday. Interstellar space, scientists now know with certainty, is dense with particles, and the place is literally hissing. Or maybe you could say it’s whistling in the dark.

“It’s almost a pure tone. Like middle C. But slightly varying, like your piano is not quite tuned right,” said Donald Gurnett, a University of Iowa physicist who has been working on the Voyager mission most of his adult life.

Gurnett is the lead author of a paper published Thursday in the journal Science that provides what seems to be the final, incontrovertible evidence that NASA’s Voyager I has crossed into a realm where no spacecraft has gone before.

Scientists have long thought that there would be a boundary out there, somewhere, where the million-mile-per-hour “solar wind” of particles would give way abruptly to cooler, denser interstellar space, permeated by charged particles from around the galaxy.

That boundary, called the heliopause, turns out to be 11.3 billion miles from the sun, according to Voyager’s instruments and Gurnett’s calculations.

Beyond the boundary, space is — perhaps counterintuitively — much denser with particles. There are 80,000 particles per cubic meter in the region where Voyager I is now, Gurnett said.

The sun’s hot ejecta — a plasma of charged particles — forms a vast bubble, known as the heliosphere. In the outer regions of the heliosphere, the particles are relatively few and far between, with just 1,000 particles per square meter in some regions, Gurnett said. But the heliosphere has an edge. Voyager I’s epochal crossing of the boundary, into the cooler, denser plasma, took place on Aug. 25, 2012, according to the new report.

This confirms earlier findings, published in three papers in Science in June, that Voyager I on that date in August 2012 had experienced a sudden drop in solar radiation and a spike in cosmic particles coming from all around the galaxy.

But the earlier data from the spacecraft had been somewhat ambiguous. The spacecraft continued to pick up magnetic signals that suggested it was still within the sun’s magnetic field. Ed Stone, the chief scientist for Voyager, suggested that Voyager I was flying through a transitional zone.

Now, however, scientists have a new set of measurements thanks in large part to a solar flare. On March 17, 2012, the sun ejected a huge mass of particles, and when those solar particles arrived at Voyager more than a year later, on April 9, they triggered oscillations in the charged particles of matter — the plasma — surrounding the spacecraft.

From the frequency of those oscillations — essentially the sound of space itself — the scientists could interpret the density of the plasma. That density, much higher than anything registered before in the outer solar system, offered compelling evidence that Voyager I had, in fact, entered the interstellar zone.

“For the first time we’ve actually measured the density of the plasma,” Stone said. He said he’s convinced by the new data that his spacecraft has fully penetrated interstellar space.

“It’s great. This is exploration. This is wonderful,” said Stone, who has overseen the Voyager project since the early 1970s.

The two Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977. Voyager I flew by Jupiter and Saturn, the gravity of which helped slingshot the spacecraft toward the outer reaches of the solar system. Voyager I is now traveling at 38,000 miles per hour relative to the sun.

NASA Voyager.JPEG-0f145

Voyager II flew near Jupiter and Saturn and then went on to pass by Uranus and Neptune. It is not quite as far from the sun as its sister spacecraft.

Although Voyager I is now in interstellar space, it hasn’t technically left the solar system. That’s because of the Oort cloud — a region of comets in orbit around the sun.

“We’ll get to the inner edge of the Oort cloud in about 300 years,” Stone said. “Of course the spacecraft will not still be transmitting then.”

The spacecraft draws power from the radioactive decay of Plutonium 238, and Stone thinks the dwindling power supply will force engineers to start turning off instruments in 2020. Voyager I probably will go dark by 2025.

Stone said the spacecraft will pass through the far side of the Oort cloud in about 30,000 years.

Why Bother Searching for ET?

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bigufoIt’s a disturbing question, and one that I seem to get more frequently than before.

“Why are you looking for evidence of extraterrestrials? What’s the point?”

While I have always thought that the motivation for looking for E.T. was both self-evident and patently worthy, it’s possible that I’m a victim of my own job description. Others don’t inevitably agree. Some will opine that there are better ways to spend the money.

“With all the problems we’re facing here on Earth — climate change, environmental degradation, war, poverty and more — why are we wasting funds looking for space aliens?”

That’s the same argument that’s often lobbed at NASA’s space programs, and at basic research in general. The thrust is that if your work isn’t obviously helping to better my lot (or maybe the lot of a lot of others), then you’re just friction in the system.

My knee-jerk rejoinder to this all-too-easy humanism is to note that the amount of money involved is tiny. The total funding of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in the U.S. is 0.0003 percent of the tax monies spent on health and human services. And it’s not even tax money. The SETI Institute’s hunt for signals is funded by donations.

But while pointing out the realities of funding is certainly legitimate, I’ve recently promised myself to avoid doing so. It gives up too easily, and sounds like a confession: “Yes, you’re right. It’s a waste, but a very small waste.”

Well, it’s not a waste. The hunt for other sentience in the cosmos is done for reasons that could be extremely important and that, in any case, gratify the finest aspects of our spirit.

Consider the practical consequences of discovering company among the stars. These benefits are, admittedly, uncertain and hard to predict. They depend on whether we could ever decode signals from intelligence that is not only many light-years distant, but enormously ahead of us in technical ability. We’re not going to hear from beings that are at our level — they won’t have the equipment necessary to transmit a signal that today’s SETI experiments could pick up. So if a radio disturbance from ET someday floods our antennas, you can be sure that whatever’s behind the microphone would judge our own knowledge of science to be merely quaint.

Consequently, if we can make heads and tails of their signal, we could become privy to knowledge that would otherwise remain unknown until developed by our descendants centuries or more in the future. While this manna from the skies could be profoundly disruptive, you can’t argue that ignorance is blissfully preferable. It’s not.

But what if — as is thoroughly possible — we’re unable to understand ET’s broadcast? What if we just know they’re there? In the months following a detection, intense study of the signal source would garner a handful of astronomical facts — the distance to the senders, a few planetary parameters such as the length of day and the likely mean temperature, and possibly some information about the atmosphere. All of which would be interesting, and even mildly informative (did ET evolve on a world somewhat like our own?) But it would leave us guessing about the inhabitants based on the habitat. And the meaning of the message might eternally elude us.

However, even without that prize, the contest is more than worthwhile. Exploration is an oft-lauded human activity, and one that resonates in the same way that music and good stories do. It’s hard-wired into our species (and into many others), no doubt because it has survival value. Exploration occasionally rewards those who accept its risks, usually with new resources.

There’s little need to expound on the romantic lure of exploration, for few would dispute it. But there’s a special appeal in a search for other-world intelligence. We have a deep fascination for this because, after all, Darwinian mechanisms ensure that all life has a paramount interest in its own species. For us, other thinking beings are subconsciously regarded as potential equals, and interest us as competitors or mates. Of course, real aliens would be neither, but their sentience makes them compelling in a way that extraterrestrial bacteria are not.

Our curiosity is broader than merely the innate interest in cosmic doppelgangers, however. We want to know if intelligent life is some sort of wildly improbable accident. Are we the only members of the Galaxy that can actually understand what a galaxy is? Could Homo sapiens really be the pinnacle of Creation — the cleverest critters in the cosmos? If we learn the answer is “no,” that would affect our philosophies forever.

In the past I was seldom asked why we hunt for extraterrestrial company, only how. Perhaps the realities of today’s world have narrowed our vision to the near-to-hand. SETI is too speculative. And sure, concern for the immediate and the demonstrably practical is helpful in the short-term. But if we only look nearby, we can’t see where we’re going.

Frank Borman remarked that “exploration is really the essence of the human spirit.” Borman’s an astronaut, so he was tipping his hat to his own career. And so am I when I say that SETI is done out of curiosity, and is both tremendously exciting and undoubtedly worthwhile. It might alter the trajectory of our civilization. But more than that, a search for others feeds the best in our nature.

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