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.
The psychological impact of having daylight 24/7 would be pretty dire alone.
Also useful against vampires.
This is effectively moonlight, isn’t it? I thought vampires could survive that.
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.
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.
You could probably find easier ways of doing that, like weeing through their letterbox.