Emergency notice! Stop Press!
After nearly two years of work, Amazon unexpectedly cancelled the pre-order for Return to the Galaxy with just five days to go to launch.
It was a software fault in their systems. No warning. No appeal. Just gone.
Almost a hundred pre-orders have gone to cyberspace heaven, and for data privacy reasons they can’t tell me who had pre ordered the book, so I can’t apologise to you properly.
Initially, they blamed me and banned me from doing any more pre orders for a year.
Yesterday they wrote to me to apologise and lifted the ban. But all those pre orders are still lost. My carefully planned launch preparations are in bits.
If you pre-ordered, you won’t be charged. I am very sorry, but you will need to re-order on launch day. I don’t have any control over this. I’ll send you the new link the moment it goes live.
I initially planned to launch the book at $2.99 but so that early birds who booked the pre order at $0.99 don’t lose out, I will launch the book at $0.99 instead.
The pre-order is dead.
But the book isn’t. It’s ready. And I’m launching it again next week.
Same book. Same cover. Same story. Just one more battle to fight before we lift off.
I’ll explain more next week.
(Oh, and I thought you might enjoy seeing some of the adverts we have planned for Facebook next week, so I've scattered three of them lower down. Please let me know which one you like best.)
Thanks for sticking with me. You’re my crew now.
And now we have this week’s article, a mixture of Book 4 and modern-day science
(4-minute read)
The microphone drop wasn’t planned.
Rosie O’Hara, doctor, scientist, not exactly known for public speaking, was supposed to walk on stage, deliver a calm explanation of orbital infrastructure, and quietly introduce the most ambitious climate solution in human history.
Instead, she dropped the mic and swore. Twice. Into a live microphone. In front of the President.
And the world loved her for it.
What came next was no joke. Floating in geosynchronous orbit above the Pacific were five enormous solar reflectors, each a mile across. Shimmering silver on top, spiderweb black beneath, they weren’t weapons, and they weren’t experimental. They were already working. Operation Sunshade had begun.
These panels were designed to do two things. First, reflect sunlight back into space, reducing the heat hitting the planet. Second, absorb what light they could and convert it into usable electricity, storing that energy in coils on their underside. Once full, an orbital battery called an Energy Box would drift by, collect the charge, and return to Earth to deliver it to a city.
It was a system designed to do what every climate agreement had failed to achieve: cool the planet, fast, and without demanding sacrifice.
How would that actually work?
Let’s talk shadows. To reduce the Earth’s average temperature by even a single degree, you’d need to prevent a measurable fraction of solar radiation from reaching the surface. Scientists estimate that reflecting around 1.5 to 2 percent of total sunlight could offset current global warming trends.
If you spread orbital panels over strategic points above the equator, or the Pacific or Atlantic oceans, a few hundred thousand square miles of carefully placed reflectors could begin to make an impact.
That sounds massive until you remember the Pacific Ocean alone is over sixty-three million square miles. One thousandth of its surface shadowed from orbit would be enough to start cooling the planet. And in Return to the Galaxy, these panels are designed for exactly that. Maximum shadow coverage with minimum orbital clutter, aided by advanced positioning and anti-gravity stabilization.
The best part? These panels don’t block all sunlight, only a portion. Earth still receives the light it needs for agriculture and life, just slightly less of the excess that’s been overheating the atmosphere.
What about the solar energy side?
Modern solar panels are already becoming impressively efficient. The average commercial panel now converts around 22 percent of sunlight into electricity. Experimental designs in labs have passed 30 percent. In orbit, where there’s no atmosphere to scatter light and no nightfall to interrupt collection, those numbers multiply. Theoretically, space-based panels could run at near-continuous output with minimal loss. And if you're not limited by weight in the same way, as in the case of orbital megastructures built from moon or asteroid materials, you can build them large and thin, maximizing capture per square meter.
This brings us to cost. Not the cost of building the panels, but the cost of getting them up there.
How much does it cost to get to orbit?
In the past, launching payloads into orbit cost over $10,000 per kilogram. That was the going rate during the space shuttle era. Today, with reusable rockets like SpaceX’s Falcon 9, we’re down to about $1,200 per kilogram. Starship, once fully operational, is aiming to bring this below $200.
To put that in perspective, launching one ton into orbit used to cost more than a Lamborghini. Now it’s closer to a cheap bicycle. And costs are still falling. If asteroid mining or lunar manufacturing becomes practical, as envisioned in Return to the Galaxy, the cost of orbital assembly drops even further. You stop lifting materials from Earth entirely and build in space with no launch costs.
That’s how the novel envisions mile-wide reflectors assembled from lunar materials, not trucked up from Earth. The fiction reflects a logical future path.
And what about those batteries?
This is where the science is already catching up. Tesla’s megapacks, iron-air batteries, and molten salt designs are paving the way for multi-day grid storage. But even these will struggle to scale globally. In the book, the orbital Energy Boxes use advanced battery materials beyond current human tech, storing a year’s worth of power for a city in a single unit. That might be beyond us now, but the principle is sound. The idea of delivering stored power from orbit, charged by sunlight that never touches the Earth, is completely feasible.
And if you can store it efficiently, you don’t need a constant stream. You need a rotating supply, one box out, one box in, and a shuttle fleet to ferry them. That fleet already exists in the story, powered by antigravity drives. In our world, we’re still waiting for reusable orbit-to-surface shuttles. But they’re coming.
Why does this matter?
Because it offers a different kind of hope. Not the slow, compromised progress of endless summits and stalled treaties. Not the impossible ask that billions of people must sacrifice their livelihoods and change their energy habits overnight.
Instead, it offers a solution rooted in competence, science, and infrastructure. The panels in Return to the Galaxy aren’t just technology. They’re a message. That we can fix this. That we have the tools. That we are not out of time, we are simply out of excuses.
Rosie O’Hara might have bungled her first line. But what she delivered was the world’s first real shot at stopping climate collapse. Not by wishing. Not by blaming. But by doing.
The science isn’t perfect yet. But the direction is clear. And the moment we choose to act at scale, this kind of future stops being fiction.
It starts becoming reality.
Brian
Sci-fi author. Orbital realist.
Definitely not allowed to swear on live TV.
P.S. If you want to see Rosie’s big reveal and the crowd go wild when the first city batteries arrive, it’s all in Book 4 of Return to the Galaxy.