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.
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.
This will totally screw up the wildlife in the area :(
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.
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.
It’s like opposite of the Simpson episode where Mr Burns blocks the sun to have the city use their lights at daytime.