David Kipping

A statite doesn't need to do that.

It could be basically completely static in inertial space, but it's just balancing the two forces of radiation pressure and inward gravitational pressure.

A quasite is the in-between of those two states.

So it has some significant outward pressure, but not enough to resist fully falling into the star.

And so it compensates for that by having some translational motion.

So it's in between an orbit and a statite.

And so what that allows you to do is maintain artificial orbits.

So normally, if you want to calculate your orbital speed of something at, say, half an AU, you would use Kepler's third law and go through that, and you'd say, okay, if it's at half an AU, I can calculate the period by p squared as proportional to a cubed and go through that.

But for a quasar, you can basically have any speed you want.

It's just a matter of how much of the gravitational force are you balancing out.

You effectively enter an orbit where you're making the mass of the star be less massive than it really is.

So it's as if you were orbiting a 0.1 solar mass star or 0.2 solar mass star, whatever you want.

And so that means that Mercury orbits with a pretty fast orbital speed around the Sun because it's closer to the Sun than we are, but we could put something in Mercury's orbit

that would have a slower speed, and so it would co-track with the Earth.

And so we would always be aligned with them at all times.

And so this could be useful if you wanted to have either a chain of colonies or something that were able to easily communicate and move between one another, between these different bases.

You'd probably use something like this to maintain that easy transferability.

Or you could even use it as a space weather monitoring system, which was actually proposed in the paper.

We know that major events like the Carrington event that happened can knock out all of our electromagnetic systems quite easily.

A major solar flare could do that, a geomagnetic storm.