Feed: Slashdot
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Title: Startup Plans April Launch for a Satellite Reflect Sunlight to Earth
at Night

Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/02/28/0...

A start-up called Reflect Orbital "proposes to use large, mirrored satellites
to redirect sunlight to Earth at night," reports the Washington Post, "with
plans to bathe solar farms, industrial sites and even entire cities in light
that could, if desired, reach the intensity of daylight...." Slashdot noted
their idea in 2022 - but Reflect Orbital now expects to launch its first
satellite in April, according to the article. "But its grand vision is
largely 'aspirational,' as its young founder, Ben Nowack, told me..." Reflect
Orbital's Nowack describes a scene right out of sci-fi: An extremely bright
star appears on the northern horizon and makes its way across the sky,
illuminating a 5-kilometer circle on Earth, then setting on the southern
horizon about five minutes later, just as another such "star" appears in the
north. To make the night even brighter, a customer could make 10 "stars"
appear at once in the north by ordering them on an app. Two such artificial
stars are in development in Reflect Orbital's factory. Nowack showed them to
me on a Zoom call. The first to launch is 50 feet across, but he plans later
to build them three times that size. If all goes according to plan, he'll
have 50,000 of them circling the Earth in 2035 at an altitude of around 400
miles. Nowack plans to start selling the service "in mostly developing
nations or places that don't have streetlights yet." Eventually, he thinks,
he can illuminate major cities, turn solar fields and farms into round-the-
clock operations for any business or municipality that pays for it. He
likened his technology to the invention of crop irrigation thousands of years
ago. "I see this as much the same thing," he said, arguing that people would
no longer have to "wait for the sun to shine." The article adds that Elon
Musk's SpaceX "wants to launch as many as a million satellites to serve as
orbiting data centers - 70 times the number of satellites now in orbit."
(America's satellite-regulation Federal Communications Commission grants a
"categorical exclusion" from environmental review to satellites on the
grounds that their operations "normally do not have significant effects on
the human environment." The public comment periods for the two proposals
close on March 6 and March 9.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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