Reflect Orbital, a California startup, has opened applications for anyone who wants to use a satellite with a mirror on it to reflect sunlight to a specific location on Earth after dark. You might be wondering: What?
A few years ago, VICE spoke with Reflect Orbital’s founder and CEO, Ben Nowack, about his plans to generate solar power at night.
“I had an interesting way to solve the real issue with solar power. It’s this unstoppable force,” Nowack said in the interview. “Everybody’s installing so many solar panels everywhere. It’s really a great candidate to power humanity. But sunlight turns off. It’s called nighttime. If you solve that fundamental problem, you fix solar everywhere.”
The company’s orbital mirror is set to launch in 2025, and you can “apply for sunlight” for the next few months. There’s “limited availability,” and already supposedly over 30,000 applications. It really just sounds like a one-time test, though: you only get four minutes for a diameter of 5km. No price is listed.
It takes a special mind to figure out they need to “solve” nighttime.
That said, I wonder if you could use it to screw with people. Would it also have military applications? What if you could light up the area you were about to attack and then come at them out of the dark. Also useful against vampires. Once you start thinking about it, the applications are endless.
Military applications abound. Just have a dozen of them in space and point at one location. There has never been a cheaper way to kill everyone in a 5 km radius.
To produce just regular intensity sunlight in a 5km area, you need at least 5km of orbital mirrors. The largest mirrors in space today are on the order of meters.
This is just a scam, its never going to produce viable sunlight or weapons.
The psychological impact of having daylight 24/7 would be pretty dire alone.
How much light pollution do you want? And how much would you like to fuck up the cycle of the ecosystem?
That CEO guy: yes and FUCK YES!
That’s not a moon!
Seems like a great way to accelerate Kessler Syndrome.
Also useful against vampires.
This is effectively moonlight, isn’t it? I thought vampires could survive that.
Spoilsport.
Back to my plan to make it rain holy water.
There’s a Martin Mars flying boat that’s recently been restored to flying condition.
“in the process of focusing our mirrors, we may have set Mars ablaze… Oops”
In other news, giant magnifying glass treating humans like ants? More at 11
It’s going to take quite a while for your solar panel to produce the amount of energy it took to launch that mirror up there. This is like tearing down a rainforest to make room for a wind turbine.
This is like selling AA batteries. Energy efficiency is not the only consideration in an energy technology.
I cannot think of a scenario that this is legitimately solving a problem that couldn’t be solved about 1000x cheaper and with less environmental damage.
What a nice startup scam. But let’s assume this piece of shit is actually built. A single space grain will shatter that mirror into the sparkliest of catastrophes in human history. I can finally look up at the night sky and say unironically “Those aren’t stars…”
Can I use it to annoy my neighbor?
With a 5km radius, yes, yes you can. All your neighbours. And their neighbours, and most of town.
Ok, so the neighboring town where the rival gang/sports team/even pettier mayor lives.
Oh, don’t get me started on how much I hate rival town’s sportsball team!
You could probably find easier ways of doing that, like weeing through their letterbox.
Or, if you have a shy bladder, pee into an old washing-up liquid bottle, then use that to squirt through the letterbox. It’s what my landlord did to his neighbours he didn’t like. He was what a certain demographic would describe as an absolute legend.
What a horrible, horrible idea. Dear God no.
It’s like opposite of the Simpson episode where Mr Burns blocks the sun to have the city use their lights at daytime.
I was promised evil billionaires blocking out the sun. All I got was inflation/price gouging and no raise.
This will totally screw up the wildlife in the area :(
It’ll screw up the human life too, if anyone’s trying to sleep
The earth can’t even currently remove as much heat as it needs to during our current night cycles, we do not need to be speeding it up and cooking it from multiple angles.
The USSR (then Russia) did this in the 90s, first prototype was a 20m wide reflector. Second prototype failed and then interest and money went away. Originally it was meant to also test solar sails feasibility.
If you have Nebula, Mustard did a 10mn documentary on it.
Why? Because they can. Has zero practical applications
Unironically, they probably want to weaponize it for military applications.
Something that gets forgotten about with OceanGate was that they wanted to rent the subs to various militaries for undersea cable sabotage. The tourism stuff was just for advertising.
What with global warming, we’ll more likely need satellites to block light from hitting earth during the day than to reflect even more to it at night!
I made this comment in another thread about this, but this would be an amazing way to screw with someone on a camping trip. Fifteen minutes of daylight would be just enough for someone to get up, get dressed, start going about their morning routine, only for the sun to go out.
Bonus points if they don’t check their watch and notice it’s 2am.
