Hacker News Reader

> The mirror fleet does not increase the total power available to the project; Mercury still intercepts only a fixed amount of sunlight.

I think I must be missing something important, because this doesn't make sense to me. If you put your mirrors in orbits where they don't block the dayside surface (sun-synchronous?), then they increase the total surface area receiving solar radiation.

View on HN

Yeah, orbital mirrors essentially expand the radius of Mercury, increasing the sunlight available. Terrestrial mirrors would ensure that light makes it from the sunward side to the dark side of the planet.

Also, the kind of satellites that aren't much more than mirrors, even with today's knowledge, they can be designed to change their profile/surface and thus reduce the absorption of the incident radiation, if they'd had to cross the space between the sun and the sunlight collector areas.

Isn't the point of mirrors to concentrate heat for mining, not to get more total power?

Not in orbit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com