A different kind of SBSP

From: brooksn

> Solar sailing, so using the pressure from the sun to keep you aloft without being in orbit?
> I wouldn't think there'd be enough pressure to counter the gravity.

That would all depend on the mass per square area.

I know there's been a proposal to speed up the terraforming of Mars using an enormous halo mirror to concentrate and reflect additional sunlight onto the nighttime side of Mars. At first I thought the mirrors were rotating to resist the Martian gravity (essentially in orbit), and thought they had foolishly neglected to consider that such an enormous mirror ring would gyroscopically maintain orientation relative to the stars and hence would fail to track the sun as Mars orbits. But I later came to realize that the proposed mirrors were not rotating, but were statites, a bit behind Mars relative to the sun, with gravity from Mars exactly balanced by the solar pressure.

So I suppose such a scheme would work. To which I would only say that if Zubrin is right, and we should leave O'Neill habitats out of our thinking because space mirrors a few miles across would get us into "engineering absurdities", then any researcher proposing mirrors bigger than worlds should get kicked out of the conference.

Regards,
Mike Combs