A planetary sunshade is one of those ideas that gets filed under science fiction and left there. A constellation of thin reflectors, parked at the gravitational balance point between the Earth and the Sun, shading the planet by a percent or so and buying us time on warming. The reason to take it seriously now is that the industrial base required to build one is the same base that SpaceX, NASA, and a handful of startups are already racing to stand up for entirely commercial reasons. Ross Centers and Morgan Goodwin of the Planetary Sunshade Institute have been working on this since before it was a field, and in this conversation we trace the whole path: from why even clean energy eventually hits a planetary limit, to how you’d manufacture forty-kilometer solar sails out of moon dust, to who would actually be in charge of the global thermostat once it exists.
Link to previous article I wrote on this:
The Case for a Planetary Sunshade
Earlier this month I was at the University of Nottingham for the first-ever Planetary Sunshade Workshop, a gathering of about 70 researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and policy people convened with the International Academy of Astronautics and the
Guest introduction
Ross Centers founded what became the Planetary Sunshade Institute in 2018 and is the founder and CEO of Ethos, where he’s developed electrochemical metallurgy techniques on simulated lunar regolith. Morgan Goodwin is PSI’s executive director and has spent twenty years working in climate. The Institute recently convened the first planetary sunshade workshop in Nottingham, drawing more than eighty researchers, and is funded in part by the UK’s ARIA to baseline sunshade architectures. Learn more at planetarysunshade.org.
Key topics with timestamps (also use as YouTube chapter markers)
04:37 — A field comes into being. How a single paper from the 1980s and a workshop of eighty-plus people in Nottingham turned the sunshade from an idea into a research field.
07:52 — Welcome to climate. Morgan on what it’s like to enter climate work from the space world, and why the people closest to you often won’t engage.
22:13 — What a Dyson Swarm actually is. Solar-powered data centers orbiting the Sun, and the Kardashev-scale logic that points there.
27:09 — The planetary heat limit. Why even a fully renewable civilization eventually warms the planet through waste heat alone.
28:59 — SpaceX as a Dyson Swarm company. Ross’s read on what the largest IPO in history is actually for.
34:58 — Mining the Moon. Morgan’s Hoover Dam analogy and the economics of building from lunar material.
47:06 — The Heliogyro. A forty-kilometer spinning solar sail made almost entirely from aluminum, walked through step by step.
57:41 — Who governs the climate. Why only governments can deploy SRM, and what “the climate government” means.
1:01:29 — Sunshade and SAI as complementary backups. Why having two cooling technologies beats having one.
1:16:01 — Does a sunshade ever come down? The generational-memory question, and whether planetary management becomes permanent.
Inevitable & Obvious is where I work through the technologies and the politics of cooling the planet, with the people actually building the field. If conversations like this one are useful to you, subscribing for free at inevitableandobvious.com gets you every episode plus the writing that goes deeper than the audio.
