In August, entrepreneur Elon Musk suggested in a social-media post that Earth could be cooled by launching satellites into space to shade the planet from the Sun. These 'sentient satellites', he wrote, 'can solve global warming for ~1B years'. It's unclear whether Musk, the chief executive of aerospace firm SpaceX in Starbase, Texas, meant for this to be taken seriously. But some researchers are earnestly investigating space-based methods of reflecting sunlight away from Earth to cool the planet as temperatures rise to increasingly dangerous levels. A non-profit organization called the Planetary Sunshade Institute in Los Angeles, California, published a report this month that researchers say is the most detailed analysis yet of such geoengineering methods. The report ' which summarizes studies from a consortium of engineers and climate scientists, including some from leading space agencies such as NASA ' estimates that it could become viable to begin building a 'planetary sunshade'...
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