California-based startup Reflect Orbital aims to build a swarm of 4,000 giant mirrors in low Earth orbit to “sell sunlight” to customers at night. Experts warn that the mirrors could mess with telescopes, blind stargazers and impact the environment.
Reflect Orbital, which was founded in 2021, has recently taken the first step in a scheme to sell sunlight at night by bouncing solar rays off giant “reflectors” that can redirect the vital resource almost anywhere on our planet. By doing this, the company aims to extend daylight hours in specific locations, thus allowing paying customers to generate solar power, grow crops and replace urban lighting.
But experts say it is a wildly impractical plan that should never get off the ground. What’s more, the resulting light pollution could devastate ground-based astronomy, distract aircraft pilots and even blind stargazers.
Throw these guys in a volcano. Add the billionaires and tech capitalists while at it.
What are the space laws for if we nudge it into the sun?
nudging them to burn up in the atmosphere is much more doable
Fun fact: pushing things into the sun is really difficult. Short version: imagine spinning a pendulum, then trying to slow it down, except the pendulum is 100kg (200lbs) and moving at 87 Mach.
Long version:
Anything launching from earth will have a significant orbital velocity around the sun by virtue of starting at the earth’s own velocity (~30km/s, about 67000 mph). That velocity makes it hard to actually reach the sun.
Consider that even the sun’s gravity isn’t enough to pull in the earth at that speed. Simply applying thrust towards the sun would have to amount to a significant portion of the sun’s gravity to make a noticeable difference.
So to reach the sun, you’d ideally have to get rid of that excess orbital velocity instead. That requires a lot of force, to put it mildly. That kind of force requires powerful boosters and a lot of fuel. Of course, getting those engines and that fuel up there also takes powerful engines and a lot of fuel. But the larger the rocket, the heavier it’ll be, so it’ll require even more fuel…
There’s a phenomenon dubbed the “Tyranny of the Rocket Equation”. It describes the problem that, at some point, the extra weight required to make a rocket more powerful is greater than the extra power it provides. That basically puts a limit on how strong a given engine can get. There’s a lot of work being done on getting them to be more efficient, so that limit is getting higher, but the bottom line is:
It would require an immense amount of resources to slow an object enough to toss it into the sun, and more resources to get them to that object in the first place.
Physics is a cruel mistress and a mean spoilsport.
It’s nice how, in theory, some crackhead silicon valley startup would be allowed to single handedly fuck up just about everything
Yeah, but think of the value they will create for the shareholders!
“In theory”? More like “Move fast and break society.”
Next idea : Shining ads in space, powered by sunlight, so people always have something to look at. /puke
I remember the mickey mouse series where scroge did just that, or was it donald. That was from way before year 2000 BTW.
So what’s next, solar roadways?
this startup’s CEO and finding members should be trialed for crimes against humanity
Don’t worry they’ll get bought up by starlink or Palintir.
Hey so, this might seem pretty extreme but um…
People who even attempt to steal sunlight should die. I don’t care how, they should just be dead.
Real talk; if someone who knows these supervillain-level lunatics could do the entire planet a solid and break their arms, I’d really appreciate it.
Then you should fund my plan to build a giant magnifying glass and attach it to a blimp. Then we can fly over the ne’er-do-wells and zorch them.
Agreed.
So literal space lasers?
Just like a certain great philosopher said, “The sun is a deadly laser”
Not any more, there’s a blanket
Rich people should not have the choice to have fucking sunlight in the middle of the night.
I think there’s a couple of Bond villains with similar setups. Not sure how I feel about that, but felt it was worth mentioning.
We are living in a moment in time now where CEOs are blatantly Bond villains but no one to stop them except by popular revolt.
If any of these CEOs have diamonds embedded in their face, transitioned to being British from North Korean, or has a 3rd nipple: Keep an eye on 'em.
New rule. All CEOs must now always be shirtless so we can all confirm that they don’t have a third nipple.
Fucking hell it was Chandler all along!
Scientists: One desperate plan we are considering to combat climate change is a series of gigantic mirrors to deflect sunlight away from the planet.
These assholes: OK, but what if, like, the opposite of that?
In addition to being a moronic idea, this is also physically infeasible as I outlined in excruciating detail in my comment the last time this came up. The takeaway is that this is an investor scam for sure, and the side effects outlined in this article are just a fun (!) and exciting (!) sideshow if these bozos actually do mange to get a single mirror off the ground and deployed. Which they probably won’t.
I disagree they are bozos. I’m actually coming around on the idea. Not the mirror thing of course, but the VC grift using a flashy idea. Millions of dollars and the only thing you make is a slideshow? Brilliant.
I’m gonna start a startup called startup starter and my business plan will be selling business plans to startups that are flashy enough to attract VC money so you can siphon off as much as possible before the business folds.
It’s tricky business. The idea has to be plausible enough to attract investors, but implausible enough not to get looked at too closely by clever investors. Similarly, you have to drum up enough publicity to get interest, but not enough to get scrutiny.
Get the balance wrong and you get Theranos.
Theranos made a bunch of money for its creators, they just messed up by thinking they could keep lying, when they could have just admitted failure at some point and then moved on to the next grift.
Since then crypto schemes came atone and made it way easier to swindle dumb investors. So the VC grift isn’t as attractive.
I’d like to see that comment if you could link it!
I mean just on the surface of it, this is completely preposterous.
The first thing that comes to mind is you can only cover so much area. 4000 satellites would cover the dog park near me. In the scope of an undertaking like this, it’s a trivial amount of energy they could possibly gather?
That’s the main hurdle.
Re-finding this was a pain in the ass because I didn’t save it. https://lemmy.world/post/19485246/12219336
Editing to add some more meandering. Now this is even longer than the first one.
In addition to surface area limitations, there’s also a pretty obvious line of sight problem in that if your satellite is positioned such that its shiny side is facing the sun, by definition it must be facing the same direction as the Earth’s currently lighted side. The further past the dusk line onto the dark side of the Earth you’re trying to hit the further you have to rotate your mirror until ultimately the surface of it is perpendicular to the incoming sunlight. This is the angle of incidence, in optical terms, and it reduces the effective reflection not only off of the mirror proportionally to the increase in angle (in a roughly geometric manner, I believe) but also where that reflected beam of light hits the ground at its oblique angle. In real terms, it will be impossible to hit any target more than a few degrees past the dusk line with any meaningful amount of energy. Insofar as this harebrained scheme could possibly hit the ground with any amount of energy at all.
The diagram (which is surely not to scale) on these idiots’ website seems to depict a mirror in orbit around the Earth that’s about the size of Massachusetts, which is orbiting at a height that’d put it somewhere in the vicinity of the Van Allen belt, which is also a bad idea (no radio communication for you!) and would result in an orbital period of around 2.5 hours. If so, that means your mirror is whizzing over the surface at something like 14,000 MPH, and you would have some kind of line of sight to it from the ground for maybe 25% of its orbit. So even with the best will in the world and absolutely mathematically perfect rotation control it’ll only be able to remain on a surface target for about 37 minutes at most, most of which would be while it’s uselessly passing through the Earth’s shadow and is reflecting no sunlight at all, and for the remaining handful of minutes with its effective output tapering off to uselessness as it sets over the opposite horizon.
“I’ll just position my mirrors in a geostationary orbit,” says Mr. Clever. “Then I’ll have line of sight to a big chunk of the surface and my satellite won’t move relative to it.”
Well, the further you park your mirrors from the surface, the harder they are to aim. You can’t have it both ways. A geostationary orbit is about 22,000 miles from the surface, a distance from which even the tiniest error in alignment will result in you hitting the wrong target. You can use some middle school trig to calculate this for yourself: At a distance of 22,000 miles, an alignment error of just 0.01 degrees will result in the centerline of your beam missing the target by four miles, which in terrestrial terms is what we refer to as kind of a lot. Maintaining an alignment precision that high especially taking into account gravitational perturbation by the moon, etc., is a rather tall order. To maintain targeting precision within 223 feet, which is probably already unacceptable, you need a constant alignment precision of 0.0001 degrees, and you need to hold it there 100% of the time.
I don’t care how big your rocket is, that’s not happening.
All of this also assumes perfectly flat and 100% reflective surfaces on the mirrors, which never degrades or gets scuffed up or punctured by space debris. Which is also impossible.
To recap:
- You can’t reflect any more energy than strikes the surface area of your mirrors, end of story. The mirrors will be tiny, relative to the size of the Earth, and the Earth is huge, relative to the size of any mirror we can launch.
- The efficacy of your mirrors diminishes geometrically with how far you must angle them relative to the direction of incoming sunlight.
- Most of the time your mirrors will either be in the Earth’s shadow, where they are useless, or over the already illuminated side of the Earth, where they’re pointless. In easily achievable low Earth orbits, their time on target will be very short.
- Positioning the orbits high enough to mitigate either problem will make aiming mathematically impossible, and also magnify any imperfections in focus, which are certain to be vast. That won’t work either.
TL;DR: The whole thing won’t work.
What about Lagrange points? If the JWST can focus on a target millions of LY away, surely a few giant mirrors could focus on a reasonably small section of earth.
Even if they could, the L1 point would be directly centered between the Sun and Earth on the already illuminated side of the planet, which is obviously not helpful. The L2 point would be on the other side of the Earth, on its dark side, and completely within its shadow so also not helpful.
From the L4/L5 points you would not only be rather far away but also only able to hit areas pretty close to the dusk line anyhow.
Your point about poinitng (ha!) is incorrect, its pretty trivial to maintain pointing at the target. Hubble achived 7mas pointing accuracy over extended periods (thats ~0.000002degrees) with technology more than 30 years out of date. That gives you ~1.2m accuracy from geostationary orbit, which seems fine.
The real point is getting a mirror which is large enough and perfect enough into orbit is completely infeasible. As you rightly say, the maximum potential power it can provide is equal to solar insolation time its area.
The aiming is still a problem. The Hubble is relatively small. Even then, it can’t track fast enough to image the moon, let alone the earth’s surface.
Any useful reflector would be measured in Km^2 . Aiming that, with the same precision as Hubble would be a tall order. Added to that, the mirror would have to be light enough to launch. You’re basically trying to aim a sheet of tinfoil, as large as a stadium (minimum), with active tracking.
The Hubble is also in a rather low Earth orbit (340-ish miles), which enables it to use magnetic brakes which allow it to ditch the excess energy from its reaction wheels into the Earth’s magnetic field so it can stop pivoting when it aims. The further away you get from the planet the less effective that becomes. The bigger your object is, the bigger your reaction mass needs to be.
And the Hubble doesn’t inherently roast or blind innocent bystanders as it swings its point of aim across all of the intervening space between its targets. Maintaining a steady shine on one particular point on the surface is one thing, but these idiots seem to be implying that they will sell sunlight-as-a-service via some kind of subscription model to multiple customers, so they would presumably be changing targets all the time.
The amount of time it takes for the Hubble to get on a target is broadly irrelevant, only that it can keep itself there once it eventually achieves targeting. This would not be so with the hypothetical solar reflectors, regardless of what altitude they were flown at.
Thanks for the write up!
I’m curious how strong an effect atmospheric scattering would have, even after all that
The same a what the sun already has to deal with, really. If your reflection and focus were somehow 100% perfect (impossible, but maybe you could get close) then attenuation from the atmosphere would be the same as what happens to ordinary sunlight over the same surface area, since that also has to pass through the same amount of atmosphere.
Right, but in the daytime, the portion of sunlight that is scattered on the way through the atmosphere to a given spot is partially made up for by sunlight that was scattered to that spot away from other areas, which wouldn’t happen under this scheme.
I’m curious how much scattering occurs - I have no idea how to find or model that.
Yeah this is another rugpull meant to allow the rich to get richer on the money of idiots
Last time some rich fuck started screwing with people’s access to natural sunlight, it didn’t end well for him.
This is the same reason that harvesting solar energy in space and beaming it down is also a stupid fucking idea. It’s politically problematic. Nobody wants anybody to have giant death rays in space, so there’s effectively no way to get the energy down to earth. It looks like we’ll all just have to rely on all the green technologies that already work.
Weaponization or dangerous rays are not among the challenges facing space-based solar.
Contrary to appearances in fiction, most designs propose beam energy densities that are not harmful if human beings were to be inadvertently exposed, such as if a transmitting satellite’s beam were to wander off-course. But the necessarily vast size of the receiving antennas would still require large blocks of land near the end users. The service life of space-based collectors in the face of long-term exposure to the space environment, including degradation from radiation and micrometeoroid damage, could also become a concern for SBSP.
Ohh, I know of one sack lying piece of shit orange man with a fake tan who could use some concentrated sun rays. And quite a few of his accomplices.
Why is this not an Onion piece???
The Onion has become the new true journalism lately.
