Changing the Solar Constant at Earth to a Solar Variable

Robert G. Kennedy III, PE (K3TVO) k3@stellarcorp.tv

President, Tennessee Valley Stellar Corporation

Governments worldwide have shown themselves incapable of working together to effectively deal with climate change. If we cannot kick our carbon habit as individuals and nation-states, then we can deploy a sunshade in space to cool the planet. Such shadecraft will have to be huge and will take decades to build. In order to have this contingency technology available by mid-century, we can buy a long-term option by starting technology development now.

I was the lead author of a 2013 article on the design and construction of a large shadecraft called the Dyson Dot; it remains the leading authority in the field. In addition, I have been doing green energy for interesting people all around the world, helping scientists and engineers in emerging economies build stable teams to develop their own renewable resources. These experiences have led me to pursue this goal by starting with a prototype.

We have created Tennessee Valley Stellar Corporation, a non-profit entity, to cooperatively design and launch prototype shadecraft called Dyson picoDots. This project will operate at a stable, radiation-levitated orbit near the Sun-Earth Lagrange-1 point. The picoDots are based on cubesat technologies and are newly accessible to small organizations.

Robert G. Kemedy III is a polyglot generalist systems engineer who does green energy for interesting people all over the world.  His experience ranges from the very smallest scales (e.g., nuclear engineering, transmutation of elements) thru meso- (climate change and of course green energy) to the largest (geoengineering, megastructures, interstellar exploration).  Many moons ago, he spent a year on Capitol Hill working for the Subcommittee on Space in the U.S. House of Representatives.  He was invited to lecture on geoengineering in Moscow at behest of Russian Academy of Sciences / Rosgidromet (weather service), to be submitted by them to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Report.  In addition, he was formally invited by NASA twice (2013, 2015) to brief scientific staff at Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville on space-based geoengineering, esp. solar radiation management (SRM).