By March 2005, I'd already spent years trying to figure out how a solar array could track the Sun without the use of slip rings, while attached to a spinning space tether. Very late one rainy night the answer came into my mind all at once, and it reminded me of a fan dancer. pic.twitter.com/RCYj3zrnJA
— Kirk Sorensen (@kirksorensen) August 30, 2025
Why in Zeus’s name would you make something so complex and difficult to deploy when you could just not do that?
You could just use a fixed bus for the solar panels with single-axis heliostats. In other words, put a “curtain” of lightweight mirror strips (heliostats) in front of fixed solar panels. Don’t move the panels, move the mirrors. That way, the motion is minimal (only need a modest rotation range for 23.5° sun variation throughout the year) and don’t need to move a huge structure as the heliostats are extremely low-mass. This minimizes moving parts, doesn’t have whatever crazy shit is going on in that animation that will fail fast and catastrophically, and is not from a design loony bin.
Fuck does not one person have a damn brain up in here?