It is an expensive polymer compared to BoPET (a.k.a. Mylar) but it doesn't have the complex production complex. Mylar films are stronger but Kapton holds up better in the space environment so it is still the #1 choice for solar sails.
I wondered about the manufacturing life cycle dynamics of DuPont's Kapton, particularly after reading this in the article:
> Planes built since then generally use TKT, which is Kapton with two thin layers of Teflon to provide better resistance to mechanical abrasion and water intrusion.
Would a measurement of the complexity of the production complex include the part where they dump the untreated toxic manufacturing waste into virgin streams in West Virginia, or would that be an externality?
I recently saw a film produced by Mark Ruffalo that told the story of the West Virginia farmers whose stream was poisoned. They had to spend 7 years fighting DuPont's lawyers for justice, and then they died of cancer.
Dark Waters trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAOuhyunhY
The PET in BoPet (Mylar) is one of the most environmentally favorable plastics in practice used to make plastic coke bottles that look like coke bottles also as "polyester" fabrics. The "Bo" is the part that looks complex to me in that mylar production involves a careful process of stressing it in two different directions while annealing it.
It is funny because I have been tracing out the path to manufacture large Kapton/Al films using asteroid materials. It is not hard at all to find an asteroid with the resources, but the trick is building a 'chemical factory factory' that can turn space hydrocarbons into plastic films, assembling that -- the Chinese think they could build a sunshade at L1 Sunward for $60 Trillion with Long March tech, maybe SpaceX can do $5 Trillion with Starship, but to make it cheaper than that you have to make it from minor planets and turn all the 'difficulties' such as 'working into zero gravity' into opportunities such as 'easily handle films larger than New Jersey'.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/16878140177192...
The $60T is my number based on the guess that the Long March 5 costs about the same as similar western rockets.
These are claimed to reflect 90% of sunlight and the feeling on my skin and my camera's exposure meter agree with that.
I think each layer of 'space blanket' on the satellite has about the same transmission as the Wal-Mart space blanket, so with 10 layers you are decoupled from the Sun and resistant to micrometerioid scratches, spots of corrosion, etc. There is the UV-light problem but also atomic oxygen and other reactive species out of equilibrium that will eat some materials.