Is there enough of earth’s magnetic field strength at GEO altitudes for magnotorquers to work for inertial wheel unloading? LEO they are common I would have assumed at GEO you would use ION thrusters or arcjets to unload the reaction wheels for attitude control. Tethers that are electromagnetic have always fascinated me. Pump current across the magfield and Lorenz force should push you to higher orbital delta V conversely pulling current using the tether as the current source sshould drag against the EM.field lowering orbital velocity down to where the atmosphere can drag a stage down. It would be a way to deprive apogee boost stages from GTO to an ocean spashdown.
These boffins want to block 1% averaged over the whole earth disk surface that would cool the planet as would a 1% loss of solar output would. From the planets point of view it’s identical loss of solar insolation. The real question is should humans mess with the earth sun energy balance at all. Carbon dioxide is a tool for Marxism, climate actually changing is a constant for the earth’s system largely driven by orbital cycles and solar output cycles in the star itself. Should the sun heat up which as it ages down the main sequence of solar fusion humans could stave off the inevitable warming for a few millennia extending our habitable period by at least that much. Eventually as the sun moves towards it’s red giant phase the earth will heat up to point oceans will evaporate and all life will end. That’s hundreds of millions of years from now. Till the oceans are in trouble.
You're absolutely right, the torquers were used at LEO. I vaguely recall that the GEO birds used hydrazine thrusters for station-keeping. The GEO gear I worked on developing was an infrared scanning sensor (bolometer), under contract to Intelsat. I don't know whether they ever ended up using that particular design or not; I had moved on to other adventures by the time it would have flown, and the processing technology available rad-hard had advanced quite a bit by then.
I'm rather pleased to admit that I was part of the team that designed and supplied the torquers for the Hubble Telescope, and one of my joys is when someone asks me what I did in those days, I pull out a pic of the Hubble and point to the diagonally mounted torquers. I helped with a lot of great projects in those days; it was a lot of fun, and of course very instructive in the importance of doing things correctly.
> The real question is should humans mess with the earth sun energy balance at all.
They're insane. They have no concept or appreciation of the scale of the forces they're dealing with, the history of Earth's temperature over the last, say, 400M years, or even the most recent 50K years.
They make foolish assumptions of stability and continuity which are not supported by the geologic evidence, much less things like orbital changes, solar variations, etc. They are the most dangerous kind of fools.
I'm 72 and likely won't live to see such things attempted, but I fear for my daughter's generation and onward. They will bear the brunt of the crazy, murderous antics of these so-called scientists.