JFC Godzilla's eye.

How'd you get 3 Y's (should be 2), 3 H's (should be 2), and 6 S's (should be 4)?

Blanks can't account for all of those.

Assuming a 1 AU sphere for the original design spec, and assuming you want statites, then your target areal mass is around 1.6 g/m^2 .

Taking my 10% coverage estimate, the factored surface area of a 1 AU sphere is 2.81e22 m^2 or 4.5e19 kg of material. 2% of the Belt, assuming every rock is made of aluminum.

So, the article takes the pop culture version of a Dyson Sphere (big solid ball kilometers thick), rather than the actual original definition (lots of really low-mass satellites/statites), and concludes it isn't viable.

Meanwhile, the original definition only "loses" 1 order of magnitude of energy collected (~10% coverage), while requiring 16 orders of magnitude less energy to build and place.

Not to mention the maintenance costs of a kilometer-thick shell is astronomical compared to a bunch of millimeter-thick mirror sails (which you can just replace for pennies).

"Commercially-developed" being the key words. As I pointed out, TU's recycler has been up there for years, but it was developed as part of a NASA project.

That really doesn't support the claim that they're much farther ahead. TU did physical demonstrations of how they'll print structures using their Trusselator about 8 years ago, and have had their printing/recycling prototypes on the ISS for 4 years (launched on the S.S. John Young Cygnus flight). Actual microgravity testing, not just simulated.

I mean, that's a rendering of how they'll print a structure.

Here's TU actually demonstrating it.

I can't tell. I was looking up Redwire's projects after seeing this post, and I can't find any kind of real information that compares to the Trusselator tests that TU was doing.

It's much closer to Tethers Unlimited's Spiderfab.