2014 was the inflection point. 2013 brought us the term unicorn for companies, and was just long enough after the iphone that we were starting to make sense of it. That's when Elon Musk became a household name thanks to Tesla and SpaceX. Then there was Palantir. Google bought Deepmind in 2014.
Someone tried to recruit me back in 2000 for a startup that would sell a box you connect to your computer allowing you to smell things over the internet. I'll let you guess what industry he was targeting.
They seem to be talking about each satellite managing the luminosity of the full moon over a few square kilometres, and getting a few tens of thousands of them.
Even if you ignoring how much drag these must have, and hence how much electrical power you'd need for an ion drive just to keep them up, each spot being a few km across (and only getting light while the satellite is over your horizon) is just not compelling.
Given most people don't have any reason to illuminate several square kilometres at once, for realistic scenarios it will take a lot of satellites before you beat the cheap battery-powered floodlights in my local Aldi or Kaufland, and the batteries in those lasts a lot longer than the 10-15 or so minutes each satellites will be over the horizon, and reflectors like these can only supply sunlight close to sunset otherwise the earth blocks the sun from them.
In the list of things which, if you could make them at all useful, would also be relatively easy to redesign as weapons.
With global warming, trillions upon trillions of acres of immensely fertile bogland, in Northern Canada is thawing. The problem is, global warming doesn't affect daylight. 4 hours of "the sun barely makes it over the horizon" means no crops, no matter if the temp is above 0C in September.
Obviously this satellite isn't viable, but all things start small. Large tracts of land could be illuminated.
But of course, I question the logic of redirecting more sunlight, especially such large amounts, onto a world already warming uncontrollably.
Still, it could be useful for the polar caps on Mars?
Mars… needs something rather bigger. I don't know what the most cost-effective solution would be, but Mars gets about half the per-area sunlight as Earth so it would need a reflector about the size of Mars to get the same overall insolation.
My guess is it's probably easier to make a bunch of greenhouses on the surface? But the scale is so huge that which is best will be affected by technology invented after you start.
Though I have to ask the value of illuminating large tracts of mostly uninhabited land. Lighting areas where no humans are around to want the light seems like a proposition that’s mostly useful for further disturbing nocturnal wildlife.
What might be more useful is to illuminate just the areas where a human currently needs to see well. It would hypothetically be both more useful - you can concentrate more light in just the areas you need it - and less expensive.
What would be particularly cool about this hypothetical technology is that it could work equally well under foliage and indoors.
If sattelites can reflect enough light to make an impact on e.g. global warming, they can also reflect enough to circumvent it. Point them back at the sun or into space and in theory it redirects the same amount of energy away from the earth as it would pointing towards it.
That said, I'm (armchair) confident it'll be good for moonlight-level illumination on a local area at best. They'll need to scale up to thousands / tens of thousands to make any measurable impact - which is their objective by the looks of it, but it'll take a while yet. If this one creates enough backlash, a fleet won't make it. Assuming they get the money and customers to justify a fleet in the first place.
This is where people who think space access is only for satellites and LEO space stations have no imagination. We’re at a place now where if global warming did suddenly start to run away, within a year, we could realistically launch enough solar shades to meaningfully impact the situation. It’s far fetched, but this is why innovation in general is important. Not for what we know now, but for all the unknown ways it could be used in the future.
Right now we're still not close to that kind of capacity.
I suspect just painting all the rooftops and tarmac white will be about as effective as 2000 Starship launches filled with mylar sheets, plus an L1 delivery system because one thing you really don't want for a global warming mitigation is for them to fall out of LEO and burn up almost immediately from the huge drag-to-inertia ratio.
There is a fiction I've read years ago that mentioned satellites becoming makeshift weapons by overheating exposed objects (think reactors, gas trucks, oil refineries) by acting as a solar furnace via mirrors.
Not sure how it deals with practical issues such as clouds, but good enough for a story I guess.
> The temperature at the focal point may reach 3,500 °C
I thought this was interesting because it doesn’t really seem like an applicable top level claim, surely this is referring to a specific furnace, not all solar furnaces?
Then this got me thinking if there is some universal upper bound constraint to these temperatures. E.g. if I recall a telescope can’t make a source object brighter than it actually is, and this just seems like a thermal telescope, so I wonder if that principle applies here or not.
You can't focus sunlight at the satellite distances. And this is a fundamental problem, the focal distance varies for each wavelength so your focus point will be smeared. You need monochromatic light for that (a laser).
Unlike for light, in the microwave frequency domain it is easy to make very powerful microwave sources by other means than by using masers, i.e. with various kinds of vacuum tubes.
Masers are not useful as powerful transmitters, but only as amplifiers with a very low noise or as generators with a very stable frequency.
Anything that can explode if overheated in a refinery is covered with passive fire protection. This is designed to withstand jet fire exposure, meaning a heat load of at least 1100 °C and at least 250 kW/m2. Ordinary sunlight at peak is about 1 kW/m2, so your mirror needs to cover 250x the visual extent of the sun in the sky.
In regards to people with reasons to illuminate several sq km at once - I'd bet that major metro areas would see a massive savings in electricity/maintenance if these were deployed over a metro region. Whether that is more than the cost of a satellite? Who knows, it's still fiction until these people try it out. But it's at least an interesting use case.
How are the economics of this idea meant to be viable? The proposed business model is to park hundreds of millions to billion dollars of satellites in orbit, plus the costs to maintain and operate them, to meet the goal of selective area illumination and solar power. Ignoring the issue of cloud cover, which still seems to be an impediment. That's going to need to directly compete with terrestrial energy storage technology, e.g. batteries, and... general lighting. Both of which are well established, diversified and reliable market segments with vastly cheaper MWh costs compared to beaming a small amount of light down using a satellite.
This strikes me as another hand-waved scifi/fantasy inspired investment, where everyone is so caught up in proving they can achieve this (spoiler: this is obviously possible) that no one has stopped to ask does that achievement lead to a real benefit outside of VC wealth transference?
I initially liked it, particularly when the references are a bit more obscure, generally from classic scifi/fantasy. You can end with a nice sounding name and a small wink to fellow nerds.
But it is such a shame that it has started to become the brand of dark-side (militaristic/authoritarian) Silicon Valley: Palantir, Anduril, this… Tolkien would be so very sad.
PS: Palantir is at least rather fitting and honest, it’s literally an evil crystal ball (at least the one shown in the movies).
Wonder what would happen if a hacker focused all ten thousand of them on a single area for an hour or two. Sounds like a really energy-efficient way to demolish a city.
X Wing: Wedge’s Gamble (1996) by Michael Stackpole shows the rebel alliance using similar tricks during the battle of Coruscant.
> "Wonder what would happen if a hacker focused all ten thousand of them on a single area for an hour or two. Sounds like a really energy-efficient way to demolish a city."
I'm far more concerned about the people who own/build stuff like this using it as you suggest (or any of the government pets that they own) than I am about "hackers" doin' such things (although, you're entirely right to have that concern as well, because there's obviously those type of folks out there doin' bad things even with the technology we have already).
First, they don't exist and 10k of them will never exist. Second, nothing would happen, the power will be minuscule and last for a very short time focused on such a small patch.
I think people overestimate the relative strength of the sun.
Then again, assuming there's no dispersion or loss, 50.000 times the sun focused on a 60ft patch will likely have some impact. But that's complete fiction.
I think what you're missing is that they could all be focused in one spot, not spread over the city. If curved reflective buildings can melt siding, and mirror solar plants can melt salt, I'm pretty sure a city's worth of sun focused on, say, a college campus, could start a massive fire
I see your concern. The mirrors could be deliberately manufactured to have enough imperfections, or slight reverse curvature, to prevent this. It's possible with properly-designed optics to prevent the mirror from being able to focus on a spot smaller than, say, 1/50000 the mirror's area on the Earth's surface. Make each single mirror only optically capable of focusing down to a 3-mile diameter at best. Then it would be optically impossible to focus all the mirrors to a single 60ft spot, and the theoretical highest brightness at any point on Earth would just be regular daytime levels of light.
That would be fairly nonsense. There's _very_ few orbits that can stick over a particular place, and it's only places on the equator. We'd be giving up 99+% of useful orbits.
It wouldn't be an all-or-nothing type scenario -- and in fact there is already no common international agreement about where a nation's boundary extends to in the z-axis. The observed limit is "however high that country can detect and shoot something down"
If Russia had been the one to launch over ten thousand satellites in mega-constellations occupying LEO space, there would have already been a dozen senate hearings all talking about extraordinary and imminent threat to US national security and urgent need to eliminate the problem.
The only non-marginal application for this is military, surely.
It sounds too coarse-grade in terms of its area to be anything other than disruptive socially and ecologically.
Sporting and cultural events? Not really (extending the hours of sunlight over a city does have marginal value for a major celebratory event I suppose, but there just aren't that many of these).
Farming? Don't plants need night too? Does harvesting need the sun anymore?
But being able to illuminate a war zone with spontaneous sunlight you can switch off at will, that is a weapon, not least because if you are the only one with the power, your opponents will have to act knowing they may not have the cover of night.
It's not as dangerous as allowing Elon Musk to launch so many more satellites that he ends up with de facto control over access to earth orbit, but it's pretty dangerous.
Chinese outcry? There’s a lot of that in social media, their bot warriors are everywhere. Same with AI and anything that gives the USA competitive edge.
It's actually more'n a little bit scary how much of modern "politics" seems as if it could be driven by having watched any of a number of movies and thinking "We should do that!" When I hear people talk about politicians bein' like spoiled brat children in adult bodies, I tend to think that sounds like exactly the type of mentality that could see something all messed up and scary in a movie and want to try to do it in the real world. What makes it even more scary in my mind is that we've allowed those type of people to gather entirely too much money and power such that they have the option available to them to seriously consider trying such horrible ideas.
Obvs "MaaS" capitalisation for the full stock valuation.
Obvs(2) a variant of this service has traditionally been provided for free by drunken teens. They might prove to be better and more thoughtful custodians of investment funds.
So we've got this problem of the atmosphere trapping too much heat from solar radiation hitting the surface and the plan is to increase the amount of solar radiation hitting the surface?
It could only ever increase by the surface area of the satellite lens things. It'll be a rounding error compared to the surface area of Earth (or compared to the effect of greenhouse gasses over the time period you're setting up these things).
Y'know, I kinda wondered exactly the same thing... Isn't it "Federal Communications Commission" or somesuch? Is this a communication device or service? I don't think it is from everything I've read about it. Sure don't seem like it is...
> The FCC said that the “risks of harm raised on the record regarding Reflect Orbital’s solar reflector are unrelated to the Commission’s role in authorizing use of radiofrequency spectrum.”
The FCC only approved that the satellite would not interfere with other radio communications, not the ultimate purpose. They said themselves they don't have authority for that.
It should be under the EPA's authority. This has the potential to disrupt animal behavior within the illuminated area if it truly is as bright as a full moon.
Earth orbits, low orbits above all, are a finite resource, and suffer pollution as every environment, with all this kind of satellites growing in number to millions, things can go badly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
Apart tecnical and scientific reasons (no need to use thousand or million of sats), apart big speculations (suspect is the main reason), many problems can be resolved in others ways.
putting mirrors in orbit to have (little) more light is like buiding city underwater to have more cool. ops this last will be way less stupid in the future...
To downvote a different opinion without arguing is same kind of attitude: stay fresh.
The fact that they're spelling this Earendil, not Earendel, makes me think this is a direct reference to Tolkien's work. It's pretty weird for dystopian industrial initiatives to be named after characters in a work whose most unambiguous message was that rampant industrialization was ruining the world.
Sounds like a morning star reference (via some obscure Christian texts) which I will draw further towards Lucifer via Latin. Do with this idea as you please.
Tolkien's Earendil was definitely a reference to the morning star, but outside his legendarium I don't know of anyone spelling it "dil" instead of "del". If it was supposed to be a non-Tolkien reference I would've expected them to spell it accordingly.
> There are many problems with this proposal, including impacts these satellites will have on human health and safety, as well as on astronomy and the low-Earth environment.
> Flashes during mirror repointing could disrupt pilots and drivers. The light could also disrupt circadian rhythms of plants, animals and humans
One question I have is about apparent magnitude: given the satellite's small size (relative to the apparent size of the moon) it would have to be very bright to match the luminosity of the full moon on the surface.
> calculated that the Reflect Orbital spacecraft would appear as points of light with a magnitude of -15 [...] might damage the eye.
-15 seems ~10 times brighter than the moon (-12,6) if I got the formula right so it would indeed be very bright.
Reminds me of all the led lighting we have now: one evening on a random street I watched the cars, bicycles, shops, street lamps: all leds, yes a bit brighter and colder than the old bulbs I know, buuut the light sources being very small dots (with no diffuser), it feels very harsh to the eye, at least to me.
Anyway, even if it proves useful for something, it would join the long list of innovations doing one thing at the expense of everyone else (externality == light pollution in this case).
> Anyway, even if it proves useful for something, it would join the long list of innovations doing one thing at the expense of everyone else (externality == light pollution in this case).
That's a strange reading. What would keep the benefits from cheaper electricity from diffusing to roughly everyone, as they usually do?
I guess you can have both positive and negative externalities.
I went back to re-read reflectorbital.com, indeed if you're only lighting a solar farm in the middle of nowhere maybe the light pollution is not so bad outside of the targeted zone.
Still fells like a complicated solution to me. Imo we need more storage innovation and investment, a lot more. We know we'll have more and more intermittent renewables electricity production, we just have to store it.
Oh, absolutely. The space mirror idea might be a net terrible idea; more panels and better batteries could simply be it.
I just don't see why, if this turns out to work, the benefits would not diffuse (principally because I don't see a line of previous innovations where this was not the case, electricity being a prime example of an extremely potent and well diffused commodity).
If it works it could reduce the electricity price in the evenings and mornings.
Now if I take the french grid example that I know best, for the past 7 days the usual spot price is around 100 to 150€/MWh but between 9am to 6 pm it is greatly reduced due to solar production, frequently down to 0 like today (current heatwave, lots of sun). And today between 1 and 3pm we had up to 5GW of solar production being curtailed. That is on top of the nuclear plants already reducing their output by up to 8GW around noon to accommodate solar power. Hydraulic storage was also running but tops at ~3GW.
That is to say there's already unused energy during the day, in theory, if you had a MWh battery you could have charged it for free today (sometimes even been paid to do so) and earned 100€ a few hours later.
One thing I see coming (albeit slowly) is EV cars phasing out IC engines, that once plugged on the grid with their big batteries could be a good distributed storage solution: they recharge during the day whenever the price is low and smooth out the expensive peaks when possible.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 51.4 ms ] threadArtifically capturing that sounds...doomed though.
Even if you ignoring how much drag these must have, and hence how much electrical power you'd need for an ion drive just to keep them up, each spot being a few km across (and only getting light while the satellite is over your horizon) is just not compelling.
Given most people don't have any reason to illuminate several square kilometres at once, for realistic scenarios it will take a lot of satellites before you beat the cheap battery-powered floodlights in my local Aldi or Kaufland, and the batteries in those lasts a lot longer than the 10-15 or so minutes each satellites will be over the horizon, and reflectors like these can only supply sunlight close to sunset otherwise the earth blocks the sun from them.
In the list of things which, if you could make them at all useful, would also be relatively easy to redesign as weapons.
Obviously this satellite isn't viable, but all things start small. Large tracts of land could be illuminated.
But of course, I question the logic of redirecting more sunlight, especially such large amounts, onto a world already warming uncontrollably.
Still, it could be useful for the polar caps on Mars?
These seem like unlikely things though.
My guess is it's probably easier to make a bunch of greenhouses on the surface? But the scale is so huge that which is best will be affected by technology invented after you start.
What might be more useful is to illuminate just the areas where a human currently needs to see well. It would hypothetically be both more useful - you can concentrate more light in just the areas you need it - and less expensive.
What would be particularly cool about this hypothetical technology is that it could work equally well under foliage and indoors.
Crops means farmland. Farmland means food. Food prevents people from starving to death.
With global warming, existing croplands will become unusable. We'll need new farmland.
That was the whole point of my post, which also discusses other concerns.
That said, I'm (armchair) confident it'll be good for moonlight-level illumination on a local area at best. They'll need to scale up to thousands / tens of thousands to make any measurable impact - which is their objective by the looks of it, but it'll take a while yet. If this one creates enough backlash, a fleet won't make it. Assuming they get the money and customers to justify a fleet in the first place.
(For reference, I think all of these are likely to be somewhere between moderately and incredibly bad ideas...)
The energy has to go somewhere. If you're not reflecting it you're absorbing it and you eventually have to do something else with it.
I suspect just painting all the rooftops and tarmac white will be about as effective as 2000 Starship launches filled with mylar sheets, plus an L1 delivery system because one thing you really don't want for a global warming mitigation is for them to fall out of LEO and burn up almost immediately from the huge drag-to-inertia ratio.
In my book, that would have been a "Fortunately," entry.
There is a fiction I've read years ago that mentioned satellites becoming makeshift weapons by overheating exposed objects (think reactors, gas trucks, oil refineries) by acting as a solar furnace via mirrors.
Not sure how it deals with practical issues such as clouds, but good enough for a story I guess.
I thought this was interesting because it doesn’t really seem like an applicable top level claim, surely this is referring to a specific furnace, not all solar furnaces?
Then this got me thinking if there is some universal upper bound constraint to these temperatures. E.g. if I recall a telescope can’t make a source object brighter than it actually is, and this just seems like a thermal telescope, so I wonder if that principle applies here or not.
There are some non-linear effects that _are_ dependent on the wavelength, but not important to matter here.
Masers are not useful as powerful transmitters, but only as amplifiers with a very low noise or as generators with a very stable frequency.
This strikes me as another hand-waved scifi/fantasy inspired investment, where everyone is so caught up in proving they can achieve this (spoiler: this is obviously possible) that no one has stopped to ask does that achievement lead to a real benefit outside of VC wealth transference?
Can everyone just stop with all the LOTR references already why the fuck is this such a thing.
But it is such a shame that it has started to become the brand of dark-side (militaristic/authoritarian) Silicon Valley: Palantir, Anduril, this… Tolkien would be so very sad.
PS: Palantir is at least rather fitting and honest, it’s literally an evil crystal ball (at least the one shown in the movies).
X Wing: Wedge’s Gamble (1996) by Michael Stackpole shows the rebel alliance using similar tricks during the battle of Coruscant.
I'm far more concerned about the people who own/build stuff like this using it as you suggest (or any of the government pets that they own) than I am about "hackers" doin' such things (although, you're entirely right to have that concern as well, because there's obviously those type of folks out there doin' bad things even with the technology we have already).
see: https://youtu.be/lkjyeI0ykGM
Then again, assuming there's no dispersion or loss, 50.000 times the sun focused on a 60ft patch will likely have some impact. But that's complete fiction.
It sounds too coarse-grade in terms of its area to be anything other than disruptive socially and ecologically.
Sporting and cultural events? Not really (extending the hours of sunlight over a city does have marginal value for a major celebratory event I suppose, but there just aren't that many of these).
Farming? Don't plants need night too? Does harvesting need the sun anymore?
But being able to illuminate a war zone with spontaneous sunlight you can switch off at will, that is a weapon, not least because if you are the only one with the power, your opponents will have to act knowing they may not have the cover of night.
It's not as dangerous as allowing Elon Musk to launch so many more satellites that he ends up with de facto control over access to earth orbit, but it's pretty dangerous.
Obvs(2) a variant of this service has traditionally been provided for free by drunken teens. They might prove to be better and more thoughtful custodians of investment funds.
The FCC only approved that the satellite would not interfere with other radio communications, not the ultimate purpose. They said themselves they don't have authority for that.
create an artificial LEO radiation belt on purpose and wipe out 99% of satellites
part of me is oddly rooting for it these days
make Musk a millionaire again
(And you actually know that, but since it benefits you, or at least so you are told, you are "not seeing" that.)
Apart tecnical and scientific reasons (no need to use thousand or million of sats), apart big speculations (suspect is the main reason), many problems can be resolved in others ways.
> Flashes during mirror repointing could disrupt pilots and drivers. The light could also disrupt circadian rhythms of plants, animals and humans
In this article: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/new-kind-of-satel...
> calculated that the Reflect Orbital spacecraft would appear as points of light with a magnitude of -15 [...] might damage the eye.
-15 seems ~10 times brighter than the moon (-12,6) if I got the formula right so it would indeed be very bright.
Reminds me of all the led lighting we have now: one evening on a random street I watched the cars, bicycles, shops, street lamps: all leds, yes a bit brighter and colder than the old bulbs I know, buuut the light sources being very small dots (with no diffuser), it feels very harsh to the eye, at least to me.
Anyway, even if it proves useful for something, it would join the long list of innovations doing one thing at the expense of everyone else (externality == light pollution in this case).
That's a strange reading. What would keep the benefits from cheaper electricity from diffusing to roughly everyone, as they usually do?
I went back to re-read reflectorbital.com, indeed if you're only lighting a solar farm in the middle of nowhere maybe the light pollution is not so bad outside of the targeted zone.
Still fells like a complicated solution to me. Imo we need more storage innovation and investment, a lot more. We know we'll have more and more intermittent renewables electricity production, we just have to store it.
I just don't see why, if this turns out to work, the benefits would not diffuse (principally because I don't see a line of previous innovations where this was not the case, electricity being a prime example of an extremely potent and well diffused commodity).
Now if I take the french grid example that I know best, for the past 7 days the usual spot price is around 100 to 150€/MWh but between 9am to 6 pm it is greatly reduced due to solar production, frequently down to 0 like today (current heatwave, lots of sun). And today between 1 and 3pm we had up to 5GW of solar production being curtailed. That is on top of the nuclear plants already reducing their output by up to 8GW around noon to accommodate solar power. Hydraulic storage was also running but tops at ~3GW.
That is to say there's already unused energy during the day, in theory, if you had a MWh battery you could have charged it for free today (sometimes even been paid to do so) and earned 100€ a few hours later.
One thing I see coming (albeit slowly) is EV cars phasing out IC engines, that once plugged on the grid with their big batteries could be a good distributed storage solution: they recharge during the day whenever the price is low and smooth out the expensive peaks when possible.