No, it's not because NASA's rich (I wish)--nay, that's not even gold! That yellow reflective material is called Kapton, and NASA uses it to insulate its probes.
Kapton was developed by DuPont for use in the Apollo missions back in the sixties. It's a shiny sheet of synthetic plastic that can reflect heat really well without releasing gases*--all while enduring temperature swings of 673 K. As such, NASA applies the film to the outside of space probes, telescopes, and structures to protect them from the extremely harsh and radiating vacuum of space.
After freezing my balls off for the last few weeks, I decided to make my own Kapton to insulate my bedroom window.
I wanted to keep heat in while absorbing the little I received from the sun in the mornings. Ergo, I decided to make a two layer plastic film that would reflect my room's heat in and absorb the sun's heat from the outside while the air layer between the two sides provided the actual insulation.
To that end, I duct taped white trash paper to black trash paper and created my what I like to call, Kapton "Tiles."
I began by taping one tile to the corner of my window's room. Then I created and added more tiles until they covered the entire window.
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| My thought as I realized 1 tile wasn't going to cut it |
But the next day I took it all down. The AC vent behind the light blasted air into my "kapton insulation" and the constantly wrinkling plastic made too much noise. However, more than insulating the temperature, my kapton insulated light the best. I doubt one photon in the visible light spectrum leaked through the plastic to hit my eyes--my room was pitch black.
*Fun Fact: Outgassing, or the releasing of trapped gas molecules, is what gives cars that "new car smell." As a recently assembled car sits in a car lot for weeks on end, gas molecules that had attached to various parts of the car during assembly begin to escape into the air--hence the smell. While this may not seem like a problem on earth, it's a very big problem in space, where terrestrial gases can contaminate tests or harm astronauts who live in a closed environment.
