Strategic Advisor Conversations
by: Morgan Goodwin, Executive Director
Over the past few months, I checked in with our advisors, and we conducted a community survey to get your advice on where the Planetary Sunshade Foundation stands, and to inform our strategy for the coming years. In total, I held 16 one-on-one conversations with collaborators and domain experts across aerospace engineering, climate science, governance, and public engagement, and we received an additional 6 survey responses from our broader community.
The purpose of this check-in was to reassess and update our organizational identity, clarify our strategic focus for the next phase of work, and ensure we are building the kind of institution that can be credible, durable, and useful to the wider sunshade ecosystem.
We designed this process to produce concrete outcomes: an updated organizational name and logo (coming soon), a refined mission and core strategy, clearer priorities for our research, and stronger alignment on what effective stakeholder engagement should look like. The check-in will also inform future board composition and the structure of an advisory council that adds real value rather than ceremony.
We value transparency, and sharing back what we’ve learned from these checkins is key. This past week we held our annual board meeting, which was heavily informed by these findings. Now we are circulating the summary below with you for ongoing feedback and reactions. We are concurrently setting up an advisory council, and re-designing our website, and more. Stay tuned for a community update call soon to dig deeper into this updated direction.
Conversations were based on a set of questions, but the questions varied based on the conversation, given the wide scope of expertise among our advisors. I’ve organized the feedback into these themes. Quotes are taken from my shorthand notes.
Identity and naming
I asked just about everyone about our name and everyone had some sort of reaction. In general, there was a ‘good but not perfect’ feeling about the name.
We have heard that ‘Foundation’ gives the first impression we are an endowed, grant-making entity, which is not true. Several respondents liked “Institute” because it feels serious, research-forward, and legible to funders and peer institutions. One quote seems apt: “Institute is a better name, it signals normative research, and opens us up to grants and larger collaborations.” I also heard a version of this from multiple people: if we want to be treated as a credible scientific and policy-adjacent actor, our name should match that posture.
I heard opposing views on use of the world ‘planetary’, from a clear desire to drop the word altogether for simplicity, to a strong value on ‘planetary’ conveying the scale of what we’re talking about.
While I didn’t ask about the logo directly, I did hear: “I like the logo very much, but it's never clear if it’s the sun or the earth.”
Organizational Strengths and Future Organizational Priorities
I heard a lot of appreciation for our role in bringing researchers together. Our public facing invitations to participate have welcomed people into a research community and serve as a platform to exchange ideas, fulfilling a unique role in building the field. Because we’ve built up credibility across different academic fields, we’ve been effective at building connections and collaborations across those different areas. This also means that researchers don’t feel like they are striking out in some crazy direction, and instead have reassurance that they are making a contribution for the public good.
We were encouraged to continue to develop as a multidisciplinary think-tank - our value is creating a space for collaboration across disciplines. We were also encouraged to help find funding and develop funders for the field, while being cautioned against the way it can turn competitive for limited resources - the advice is as much to the funders, possibly with PSF support, to develop a framework for funding proposals to fit into and help map the needed experimental work.
Many collaborators advised us to organize a workshop or conference or gathering of some sort, which we are pleased to announce that we are doing this May! In addition to in-person convening, there’s also a desire for more interactive web forums, as well as more ways to engage in general. We hear you!
Research Objectives
The biggest theme I heard from people who are not engineers is the desire to bring the sunshade concept out of speculation and start to add credibility to the question of “what would it actually take?” From there, how does that compare to other shading methods in terms of cost, infrastructure, timelines, etc? Similarly, another respondent captured a common sentiment, which is that “we still haven’t demonstrated whether it’s possible. What’s realistic? What is the current tech?” While there are many opinions about this, how can PSF get closer to an authoritative body of knowledge here?
One researcher encouraged us to get away from the NASA and ESA model where scientific inquiry leads the missions, and the engineering supports those scientific objectives. While we have a scientific objective for the climate, the actual space missions should be led by engineering teams. This is one reason why this project might not be a good fit for traditional space agencies.
A big priority from the engineering interviewees was flying a demonstration mission. This feels critical as both the only way to advance the technology readiness, and also to distinguish ourselves by leading the research effort.
Similarly, governance and policy interviewees emphasized just how little we know about the basic framework. It would be valuable for PSF to surface what the governance challenges are. How do the defense implications intersect with the ethical considerations. These basic, real questions from ‘who has the power to control it’ to ‘what does existing space law say about this idea’ are not readily available. Would there be natural limits on that power, or “what are the guardrails that need to be built?” Similarly, who are the players in the space and who might benefit?
Climate modeling tends to seek more granularity, and to explore the unique capabilities of a sunshade. “What could a sunshade actually do?” is one question I heard. Do sunshades have the capability to block some wavelengths more than others, and would that even be desirable? We need “fine grained convection-resolving simulations” as well as research into a feedback control mechanism. We need to explore precipitation impacts, latitude impacts, and keep our inquiry wide to find as many possible impacts, positive or negative, that might surface.
Other research questions that we heard raised are:
What is the impact of these orders of magnitude of rocket launches?
What spaceports would need to be built, and who are the local constituencies there?
And finally, a research process question seems very poignant. What are the internal checks on the claims that we make? While we are heading toward peer review for much of our work, is there an internal process to fact-check the credibility of generalizations and assessments?
Narrative and Public Engagement
Almost everyone I talked to had thoughts on how PSF engaged with the public, and what sort of narratives emerge in how, when, and with who we talk about the concept of a sunshade.
Overall, the common theme is a desire for a credible, public facing source of information which grounds us within the larger climate issue and shows what we know, and what we are doing. Some felt that we were doing an impressive amount of public engagement, and others felt like we weren’t doing nearly enough, but the desire for us to be more outwardly engaged through traditional and social media was a common theme. In particular, it’s key to always clearly connect our research to potential real world benefits and not just abstract and specialized knowledge.
PSF has helped to establish a narrative that sunshades should be seen as a long-term wind down strategy for an aerosols deployment. Several of our interviewees were grateful for this, and credited us with this framing. Indeed, I was encouraged to keep going here: “given SRM talk is out there, and the only strike against space based is that it’s big and hard’, someone should research this.” I also heard a worry that the sunshade concept would get cut out of the SRM discussion just because it’s viewed as less well understood. The advice was to “talk about plausive futures, how technologies develop, then tell a story of how it’s time will come.”
Conversely, several engineers expressed a desire for the larger SRM community to do a better job of what constitutes success. What are the criteria for deploying a shading solution? There’s frustration that there’s no clear process or
I was also intrigued by one narrative framing for our research. Given we are working to explore how (and if) a sunshade might be built, one person likened our work to prospecting for mineral claims. If we find valuable stuff, that’s great, and if not, then it’s still a clear answer. Many moonshots don’t work, but they still throw off benefits.
My interviewees were somewhat split on whether we should focus on engaging with more elite, or more public facing forums. There is the sense that more ‘elite’ professional, policy making people are where decisions get made, and that these forums, like the IPCC, UNEP, COPUOOS, etc, require relationships and very specific forms of knowledge. For example, we could focus more on tying a sunshade to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. These are also the technocratic circles where a consensus seems to be forming around deploying SAI - there’s a worry that space will be unhelpfully locked out of that consensus. Whereas other sunshade experts are hungry for more widespread understanding of the concept. (The PSF is focused on the former arena. While we respond to media interviews, and are committed to providing accurate sunshade information to the public, we are not proactively trying to develop large audiences.)
Several people talked about the role of the United States, and how sunshades are (or might be) viewed in US politics. Some researchers advise us to keep our head down and ‘keep some distance’ from the polarizing climate conversation. “Stay out of carbon-zero politics and just focus on this solution,” and see the natural synergies with US defense interest in space. Others advise the opposite, to really stay away from the defense industry, given how scary that is for the rest of the world.
In Summary
I hope this has been a helpful distilling of a lot of conversation and perspectives. Many of these individuals will be joining our Advisory Council, to be announced shortly. We are deeply grateful for the growing network of leaders who are engaging with this topic, especially because this group spans such a wide range of opinions. We welcome that!
Many of my interviewees touched on some, or all, of the tensions that we will navigate in the work going forward. I am summarizing them here. Our organization’s focus for the next several years will be be dedicated by how our answers to these questions:
Broad community convening vs. focused research on a specific technical pathway
Advancing technical understanding vs. investing in governance and public engagement
Communicating broadly with the public through many channels, vs. focusing on more technical and policy focused forums
Emphasizing the capability and benefits to the US to pursue this concept, vs. aiming toward more of a globally unified effort
Seeing our research as contributing to the SRM community and the larger processes and deliberative forums that community has setup, vs. ‘going it alone’ and staking out a narrative of sunshades as a unique concept.
How much climate science is necessary and what constitutes success in that area of inquiry?
Developing a picture of an ‘end state system’ and working backwards, vs. focusing on near-term demonstration missions
Lunar resources of earth launch as the source for the majority of a sunshade’s mass.
Do we imagine an internationalist order with collaborative decision making among governments as many of us grew up imagining, or do we imagine a more chaotic world with a few larger and perhaps less constrained global actors.
If you are relatively new to the planetary sunshade concept, I hope that this illuminates the field in a helpful way. If you are well steeped in the field, I hope this fills in gaps by adding interesting perspectives. Regardless, please feedback! Email us at info@planetarysunshade.org My purpose is to continue the dialogue, and thereby help the world make the best decisions as the climate destabilizes in the years ahead.