Practical Space

The devastating earthquake in Haiti is one of those rare events that are so big as to seem unapproachable.  The scope of the disaster and the response it requires leaves one grasping for a frame of reference or perspective.  While looking at photos of the aftermath, it occurred to me that there was very little artificial light for search and rescue.  Most of the images I have seen that were taken at night show a single source of light, often doing an insufficient job of lighting the area, and leaving eerie shadows on already ghastly images.  In the aftermath of any disaster, generators and flood lighting is an urgent need for conducting search and rescue, establishing shelters, and rebuilding vital infrastructure like roads and airports.  Earthquakes do an especially good job of destroying electrical distribution infrastructure and many hard hit areas will go weeks without power, making the daylight hours even more critical.  

 Back when I was 10 or 11 years old I had been given (I can't remember by whom, though I ought to thank them) a small book about future technologies.  It was maybe 30-40 pages long and had color illustrations.  There were several ideas in that book that stuck with me the rest of my life as excellent ideas that I could hardly imagine we still lived without.  One of those concepts was the idea of using giant, geosynchronous  space mirrors to reflect the Sun's light back down to the Earth on its dark side.  While there are still numerous technical challenges to overcome in making this technology work--the Russians have experimented with it twice, once in 1993 and then again in 1999--I can't help but wonder what it would mean to disaster areas like Haiti to be able to bring light down on an around the clock basis, simply by adjusting the angles on some satellites.  Besides the aid to search and rescue, the value to the process of rebuilding and maintaining order is probably incalculable.  

Of course these mirrors would be enormously expensive and their control by a single political entity would probably make waves.  But the benefit in times of disaster, war, or even celebration could be equal to their cost.   NASA's space-going future continues to be a grey area and the current administration continues to struggle to find good reason to keep it alive.  I can think of no better way to simultaneously justify NASA's existence, stimulate the high tech sectors of our economy, and get something practical out of the deal.  After all, it has to be cheaper than going to Mars and there is always some part of the world in need of more light.